Friday, October 22, 2004
Stolen Honor
SO there's a transcript of Stolen Honor up here. I think I agree with the Times review to some extent; I'd love to see these guys talk. But Carlton Sherwood's voiceover seems to me to pretty clearly fall into the category of "damned lies." A few choice excerpts, all Sherwood in voiceover:
The parts of Apocalypse Now that are good would be good if they were set on Mars, or if all the main characters were VC, or however else you want to recast it. (and Brando would be fat, bald, and bad if he were playing Gozo the Great, destroyer of worlds, or whatever). For sheer filmmaking bravado, you don't get much better than the helicopter attack sequence. You guys say what you want about Vietnam, but leave Ford Coppola out of it.
Sherwood also lists Platoon as a bad movie, full of lies, practically co-written by Kerry (who, after all, singlehandedly created the popular image of the Vietnam war). In the same breath, he says "It's about a war I've fought in and what I saw happening when I got back from it," about his own movie. Well, shit, Oliver Stone fought there too. I don't much like Platoon but why deny Stone the right to make his own movie about what he saw over there?
Last, but certainly not least, Sherwood states that the Winter Soldier investigation had been utterly discredited. Unfortunately, this isn't true. We couldn't get through a year in Iraq without torture and rape; does he really think we made it through 12 years in Vietnam?
Look, I read the transcript with an open mind, and I don't deny the anger toward Kerry the men he interviewed feel. I'd love to see that footage. But, and I'm hoping you can agree with me here, it does seem to me that Sherwood is more interested in smearing John Kerry than looking at how these guys dealt with torture and the war's aftermath. And I could be wrong about this, but claiming that Kerry invented the popular conception of Vietnam seems to me to be a little overreaching.
Oh, and last of all, it looks like the writer for Slate got the sequence of quotes wrong in her review. Sherwood didn't accuse Kerry of ball-wiring. Just "violations of those Geneva Conventions,... the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, [and] the killing of prisoners." So that's ok, then.
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I felt the honor of fighting for my country decomposing just as surely as if all the battle ribbons have been stripped from my chest, leaving only torn patches where once the dignity and sacrifice had been.So can we at least agree this guy's a terrible writer?
But what about the allegations themselves? How true were they? How many were out-and-out fabrication, lies, designed to shock America, throw one last spotlight on the waning anti-war movement? And how many were driven by one man's personal political ambitions?The waning anti-war movement? In 1970-1971? Come on.
More than that, wasn't [John Kerry] saying that Americans, by their nature, were a murderous horde, unrestrained by accepted rules of combat or even the most basic forms of human decency?You raise a good question. The answer is no. No, he wasn't.
Were John Kerry and his fellow anti-war activists responsible for lengthening their imprisonment, and in doing so, causing the deaths of men who may otherwise have survived?Sherwood asks the vets this, and they all say yes. But they all also seem to agree that we lost the war *because* of the anti-war movement in America, and that if not for the actions of John Kerry, we would have *won* the war in Vietnam by 1970. That's crazy talk. And I'm inclined to believe that the torturers in Vietnam would have found something to taunt prisoners with if Kerry hadn't testified. It's not like his testimony gave them the idea.
Perhaps films like "Apocalypse Now" which reflects John Kerry's view of a murderous America will no longer be made because the dishonesty of it has been exposed.I don't think most Americans think that a retelling of Heart of Darkness (Hey, Sherwood--you forgot Poland!) is meant to be a documentary. And if Sherwood thinks that the point of AN or HoD is "John Kerry is right! America is murderous!" then I can't imagine he saw the movie or read the book.
The parts of Apocalypse Now that are good would be good if they were set on Mars, or if all the main characters were VC, or however else you want to recast it. (and Brando would be fat, bald, and bad if he were playing Gozo the Great, destroyer of worlds, or whatever). For sheer filmmaking bravado, you don't get much better than the helicopter attack sequence. You guys say what you want about Vietnam, but leave Ford Coppola out of it.
Sherwood also lists Platoon as a bad movie, full of lies, practically co-written by Kerry (who, after all, singlehandedly created the popular image of the Vietnam war). In the same breath, he says "It's about a war I've fought in and what I saw happening when I got back from it," about his own movie. Well, shit, Oliver Stone fought there too. I don't much like Platoon but why deny Stone the right to make his own movie about what he saw over there?
Last, but certainly not least, Sherwood states that the Winter Soldier investigation had been utterly discredited. Unfortunately, this isn't true. We couldn't get through a year in Iraq without torture and rape; does he really think we made it through 12 years in Vietnam?
Look, I read the transcript with an open mind, and I don't deny the anger toward Kerry the men he interviewed feel. I'd love to see that footage. But, and I'm hoping you can agree with me here, it does seem to me that Sherwood is more interested in smearing John Kerry than looking at how these guys dealt with torture and the war's aftermath. And I could be wrong about this, but claiming that Kerry invented the popular conception of Vietnam seems to me to be a little overreaching.
Oh, and last of all, it looks like the writer for Slate got the sequence of quotes wrong in her review. Sherwood didn't accuse Kerry of ball-wiring. Just "violations of those Geneva Conventions,... the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, [and] the killing of prisoners." So that's ok, then.
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