A Slightly Different Approach

Rating: Null/10 (25 January 2009)

Take a look at the typical war pictures from the 1950's and early 60's. When they're not comedies that make the logistics side look like fun (Mister Roberts, Operation Petticoat, et al.), they're making WWII look like nothing but a virtuous march to victory (Battle Cry, The Longest Day, et al.). Or take a look at the carefully edited TV documentaries that influenced a generation (Victory at Sea, Crusade in Europe, et al.), or the innocuous, de-politicized TV series of the time (Ozzie and Harriet, The Ed Sullivan Show et al.). Or consider how quickly that "forgotten war" in Korea really was forgotten. In brief, the Cold War culture of those 15 years created a Ron Kovic generation that had no reference point beyond a sanitized framework filled only with uncritical images of America and its past. How surprising is it, then, that thousands of us of that generation learned our politics the hard way.
The movie shows in painful detail the price Kovic paid for his eager willingness to believe. It's a harrowing story, to say the least. But then, how prepared were any of those teen-age grunts to understand that Vietnam was not WWII. How prepared were they to understand the anti-occupation struggle of the Vietnamese was one they had been fighting for decades. There was nothing in American popular culture to prepare them for those realities. For to do so would have required questioning whether we were really the biggest and the best, or whether those terms should even apply. That's why Kovic must break with the past in order to regain a semblance of mental health. It even requires breaking with a mother and father too innocent to understand. Perhaps they can reconcile later on. In the meantime, Kovic and those around him will have to accept that he is now a different man who no longer "fits in" the way he did.
It's a wrenching and well-done film, showing how wars of empire are really fought. But more importantly, it's a beneficial warning to those who would go thousands of miles away to a strange land to fight a politician's war. Thankfully, that message is a long welcome way from the war movies of my youth.