One Writer’s View of the Vietnam Movies

NEW YORK —  James H. Webb Jr., former Navy Secretary, Vietnam veteran, winner of the Navy Cross and a best-selling novelist, is asked if he has seen any Vietnam movie that impressed him. His reply is cautious.

“I haven’t seen all of them,” he says. “I got so saturated with Vietnam when I was writing ‘Fields of Fire’ that I just don’t know that much.”

He means his best-selling Vietnam novel of 1978. It’s based on his combat experiences in 1969, when he was a Marine platoon leader, working the deadly terrain southwest of Da Nang that the Marines called the Arizona Territory, or simply the Arizona.

Twice wounded in the war, Webb thinks a minute, then talks about three of the better-known Vietnam movies. He starts with Oliver Stone’s “Platoon,” easily the most financially successful of them all to date.

“I liked the first 20 minutes of it very much, up through the ambush (sequence),” he says in an interview from his office in Arlington, Va. “And then, in terms of credibility, I think it sort of lost it after that.”

How so? “The lack of camaraderie. It was sort of an overblown Conradian allegory of good versus evil. It’s kind of an interesting idea, but I don’t think it fit into the platoon structure.”

But the technical details, the care in portraying a grunt’s daily existence, impressed him. He credits the “Platoon” technical adviser, Dale Dye, a retired Marine captain, for that.

“I think Dale Dye saved that movie.”

His assessment of Francis Coppolas “Apocalypse Now” is brief: “A disaster.” Michael Cimino’s “The Deer Hunter” gets a kinder review.

“It was interesting,” Webb says. Although flawed in its details of combat, he adds, it was broad in scope, and “as an emotional statement, I think it was very powerful.”

He also has praise for a 1978 film that had little publicity but good word-of-mouth among veterans who have seen it--”Go Tell the Spartans,” starring Burt Lancaster as an aging Army major in the early days of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

That film, Webb says, “was extremely good, although a little stiff . . . of that first generation of (Vietnam) films, that was the only one that to me had any credibility at all.”

Ironically, despite more than a dozen Vietnam films made since the late ‘70s, “Fields of Fire,” Webb’s first novel, never has gotten the nod from Hollywood, although it once was optioned for a movie.

The book has gotten its share of criticism, including from some in military, he notes, “but it’s honest. It offends everyone . . . it’s got dope in it, it’s got shooting people up.”

There are still periodic inquiries about “Fields,” he says, but no solid film offers. Why not?

“You’d have to ask them,” Webb says, “I really don’t know.”

Now writing his fourth novel and a film treatment for what he calls “a contemporary Marine Corps courtroom drama,” he still hopes that someday, somehow, “Fields of Fire” will join the ranks of Vietnam films:

“That’s been one of my dreams, to be honest with you. I’ve always wanted that . . . the book was a straight shot from my heart.”

Think a film version could still happen? James Webb laughs. “I’ve learned to be very Asian about all of that. When the time comes, it’ll happen. Otherwise, it won’t. You can’t worry about it.”--J.S.