In a
recent article in a special issue of
Small Wars & Insurgencies, we considered the contribution Hollywood has made to our understanding of counterinsurgency and nation-building during the Vietnam War. The war has been the subject of so many blockbuster films that it is inevitable that they play a leading role in shaping perceptions of the conflict. Students who have never lifted up a copy of classic Vietnam books such as Jeffrey Race’s
War Comes to Long An or Neil Sheehan’s
A Bright Shining Lie can be sure to have sat through
Platoon or
Apocalypse Now. But are these films educational as well as entertaining?
In considering this question, we split films on the Vietnam War into three broad chronological categories. The first are those dealing with the earliest period of US involvement, when the focus was on CIA-led ‘political action’. The second is the advisory period, when US forces began to be deployed to advise and support the South Vietnamese military. Finally, we looked at films that deal with the full ferocity of the Americanized war of post-1965. Put another way, the films we looked at have three main groups of protagonists – spies, advisors, and grunts.
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