The 10,000 Day War

From dolls to the demilitarized zone, I'm keeping my film streak alive.

For the fourth day in a row, I had plans to see a movie. This time it was opening night for UR's new series, "Documenting the Vietnam War: Journalism, Scholarship and Film," conceived to commemorate the 50th anniversary of US involvement there and complement the new Robert Hodierne photography show of war images.

Best of all, the speaker introducing tonight's film was Peter Arnett, as in the Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent. That alone would have gotten me to the labyrinthine UR campus whether they showed a movie or not. This was a man with Stories with a capital "S."

Tonight's crowd at Ukrop Auditorium looked to be about 90% people who remember the Vietnam war on the nightly news and 10% students, some with sandwiches in hand, one in a Mumford & Sons t-shirt (yes, I judged him for that) and more than a few arriving after Hodierne had introduced Arnett as a living legend.

The movie Arnett had chosen was "A Bright Shining Lie" from Neil Sheehan's award-winning book about Lt. Colonel John Paul Vann and the US involvement in Vietnam, a movie made ten years after the book came out in 1988.

"By then, memories were fading of the war, so it's not as good a movie as book," Arnett explained. Still, it was the one he wanted us to see before he spoke.

It was an intriguing choice because the film focused on what a critic of the war Vann was, first as a military adviser and then as a civilian adviser, and his unorthodox methods of addressing the situation. Equal parts arrogant and courageous, he was was also a deeply flawed man in his personal life.

I'm sure for many of the students there tonight, the film was a crash course on the trajectory of the war, from the corrupt and incompetent South Vietnamese officials to the deeply flawed US military policy. I doubt many had heard the term "Vietnamize the war" - let them fight what we couldn't win - before.

When Vann unexpectedly dies in a helicopter crash during a rainstorm, not in battle, you got the sense that he would have preferred that random death to seeing the eventual unsatisfactory conclusion of so many years and wasted lives.

But the highlight was the Q & A after the movie with Arnett, who gamely answered question after question, some about his experiences and many about his opinions. Erudite and well-spoken, the man knew everyone.

"I never got along with Westmoreland personally, " he admitted of the military commander who so vexed Vann with his dogmatic approach and fealty to Washington. "At the time, his peers were reluctant to criticize him, but lately they're not so reluctant." Arnett characterized him as an old-school military man who followed orders because that was his job.

He also told us he'd spent a lot of time with Vann back in the day, getting his assessment of events such as the Tet Offensive. "I knew Daniel Ellsberg when he  arrived as a hawk, but by 1966-67, he was telling MacNamara the war was unwinnable."

He mentioned that he had been married to a Vietnamese woman (qualifying it with "who hated communists"), particularly interesting because Vann had married a local woman after impregnating her.

A question about the Viet Cong led to Hodierne, the war photographer, sharing that he'd gone back to Vietnam ten years ago to visit the village he'd photographed in 1967 after the US troops burned it. He'd always been curious if the attack had been justified, if the villagers had been Viet Cong.

No one left said they had been, but one old man came out wearing an ancient VC uniform, so Hodierne asked when he'd become VC. "Three days after you burned our village," he'd said.

Multiplied by how many others? Tragic.

Only one question came from a student and it was about what our country had learned from Vietnam.

"We learned not to do it again and then did it again in 2003 in Afghanistan?" Arnett quipped, before giving a more serious answer about how it was a post-war lesson that US power could not be sustained and it wasn't our role to try to impose democracy everywhere we wanted.

If only we had truly learned that lesson.

"It's impressive to see so many people of our years here tonight," Arnett said, looking out at the Boomers who had stayed for the Q & A.

"Speak for yourself," Hodierne joked before asking the Vietnam vets in the audience to stand. There were about ten of them and the rest of us gave them a huge round of applause. Once I saw who they were, I realized several of them had been the ones asking questions of Arnett.

The evening ended with humor when Hodierne thanked Arnett for flying all the way from California to speak, especially considering he wasn't being given an honorarium.

"But we do have a gift for you," he said, pulling a mug out from under the podium. On one side was the University of Richmond crest. On the other side, it read, "I spoke at UR and all I got was this lousy mug."

I went to see a violent war movie, a genre I usually avoid, and all I got was a fascinating evening with a living legend. I won't need a mug to remind me of that.