The Big Picture - 8. I Love America | Do We Get to Win This Time?

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

Oliver Stone returns to Vietnam with ‘Born on the Fourth of July’—a movie that closes out the ’80s, as well as the Vietnam movie boom. But ‘Forrest Gump’ and ‘Dead Presidents’ prove that ’90s audiences aren’t ready to leave Vietnam for good. Other films we talk about in this episode include ‘Running on Empty’ (1988), ‘Dogfight’ (1991), and ‘Heaven and Earth’ (1993). Host: Brian Raftery  Producers: Devon Manze, Mike Wargon, Amanda Dobbins, and Vikram Patel Sound Design: Bobby Wagner  Mixing and Mastering: Scott Somerville  All interviews for this series were conducted before the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everybody. Here at The Ringer, we're known for our talk shows, but you might not know we also have a whole slate of great narrative podcasts, all of them made for binging. If you're looking for an unmissable sports history show, you'll love Icons Club. It's a chronicle of the NBA told through the voices of legendary players, whose stories weren't blockbuster movies of their own. If you're a fan of culture podcasts, check out This Blew Up, an investigative story about how social media is inventing an all-new level of stardom, one that's not always as glamorous as it looks. There's also Gamblers, a show about people who make money betting on, well, pretty much

anything. Just don't bet on finding a better podcast about gambling, because you won't win. Thanks for listening. Ron Kovic was born on the 4th of July in 1946. He was too young to have witnessed America's triumph in World War II. But as a kid in the 50s, Kovic could relive the war over and over again at a local theater in suburban Long Island. That's where he and his friends spent hours watching World War II films like Sands of Iwo Jima. It's about a tight-knit band of Marines and their leader, Sergeant John Stryker, a gruff, likable, all-American hardass. You can probably guess who played him. And any man that doesn't want to cooperate, I'll make him wish he hadn't been born. That's right, John Wayne. In the film's final moments, his character is killed by enemy fire, and troops raise the U.S. flag as the Marine hymn softly plays.

For years afterward, every time Kovic heard that music, he'd tear up, thinking about Wayne's death scene. War movies like Sands of Iwo Jima would inspire Kovic's love for the military, and for his country. Those feelings grew stronger as he grew older, and in 1964, Kovic signed up for the Marines, a decision that would ultimately bring him to Vietnam. As Kovic explained up for the Marines, a decision that would ultimately bring him to Vietnam. As Kovic explained in a 2005 panel, he and his fellow Marines were eager to go.

There was a love of country that was sincere and genuine. You may want to call it naive, but it was real for us. It was genuine, and we were ready to risk. We were ready to sacrifice. Kovic first arrived in Vietnam in late 1965. During his early days in the war, he'd sometimes find himself creeping quietly through the jungle, imagining that he was John Wayne.

He'd return home to Long Island proud of what he'd done in Vietnam, so much so that Kovic volunteered to go back. But during his second tour of duty in 1968, Kovic was shot twice, first in the foot and then in the shoulder. The second bullet passed through a lung and severed his spinal column, paralyzing Kovic from the chest down. After he returned home, Kovic was stuck for months in a run-down, rat-infested VA hospital in the Bronx. One weekend, he was allowed to take a quick trip back to Long Island. And just like the old days, Kovic and a friend headed to a local theater. That's where they caught a big war movie that

everyone was talking about. John Wayne's The Green Berets. What, what will happen to me now? You let me worry about that Green Beret. You're what this is all about. As he left the Green Berets, Kovic felt sick to his stomach. He'd believed in the World War II movies he'd seen as a kid. But The Green Berets was about a war Kovic had actually fought in, and he wasn't buying it. On the way out of

the theater, he told his friend, this is not the way it was. Kovic would eventually write a book about his experiences before, during, and after the war, titled Born on the Fourth of July. It became an unexpected hit, and soon enough, Hollywood came calling. Which is how, in 1989, after a decade of starts and stops, Kovic once again found himself in a theater, watching a war film. Except this time, it was about his war lost and courage found. Tom Cruise. People say if you don't love America, then get the hell out.

Well, I love America. An Oliver Stone picture, born on the 4th of July. When Born on the 4th of July premiered that winter, it marked a pivotal moment in the history of Hollywood and Vietnam. The rough and tough combat tales that had ruled the Reagan era would soon disappear. They were replaced by a small but powerful group of movies set not only on the battlefield, but also at home. These films brought viewers into the hearts of those whose lives were ripped apart by the war. Soldiers, protesters, and the millions of Americans and Vietnamese

caught in between. Together, these films would help usher in the end of the 20th century Vietnam movie boom. And they'd arrive at a time when America was once again gearing up for war. From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftery. And this is Do We Get to Win This Time? How Hollywood Made the Vietnam War.

Testing, testing, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. It was August 1972, and Ron Kovic, sitting in his wheelchair, his shirt covered with buttons and medals, was in a park being interviewed for a documentary. His hair was long and stringy, and he sported an impressive handlebar mustache. Kovic and several other vets had traveled to Miami that summer for the Republican National Convention to protest the war. What are the medals for?

Racism, sexism, imperialism, massacre, murder of the Indo-Chinese people, starvation of the Vietnamese people. By this point, it had been four years since Kovic was shot and paralyzed in Vietnam. When he returned, he was haunted by his experiences during the war. In one incident, he'd accidentally killed Vietnamese children. During another, he'd mistakenly shot a U.S. corporal. As Kovic explained to the cameras that day in 1972, his time in Vietnam had curdled his view of the war, and of the government that day in 1972, his time in Vietnam had curdled his view of the war and of the government that had sent him there.

All you had to do was go out on a patrol and shoot up a bunch of civilians or put a bullet through a baby or something like that and your head began to change. During this time, Kovic became one of the anti-war movement's most outspoken figures. As screenwriter and producer Bruce Gilbert recalled a few episodes ago, Kovic's speeches

had even helped inspire Jane Fonda's Oscar-winning hit, Coming Home. He had a key phrase in there which went something along the lines of, I lost my body to regain my mind. In the mid-70s, while living in Southern California, Kovach started working on his memoir. Using a typewriter he'd bought for 42 bucks at a local Sears, he stayed up late night after night, churning out pages for Born on the Fourth of July. It chronicled his transformation from all-American true believer to angry survivor, a man who, in his own words, had given his, quote, dead dick for John Wayne.

Kovic's memoir was published in 1976, and it turned him into a counterculture hero. So when Hollywood approached Kovic about turning his book into a film, he was elated. Here's Kovic in 2005. This was all such a big thing for me. I wanted to reach more and more people with the message that I had tried to write in the book. Kovic's message wound up reaching Al Pacino, one of the biggest stars of the 70s. By 1978, Pacino had agreed to play Kovic, and the two men began hanging out in New York City. During the day, Kovic would spend hours talking with Pacino, who was growing a mustache and letting his hair go long.

And at night, Kovic would sometimes dance in his wheelchair at the infamous nightclub Studio 54. Kovic was living it up. But who could blame him? As he later said of this period, I ate $45 hamburgers from room service. It was the opposite of the rat-infested VA hospital. I was somebody. After an early script for Born on the Fourth of July fell apart, the producers hired Oliver Stone, who'd just started making a name for himself as a writer. He'd read Kovic's book when it was released and felt an immediate connection. It wasn't just their time in Vietnam that bonded them. It was their time in America. The two men were born just a few months apart and had come of age in the 50s when they were inundated with violent tales of U.S. exceptionalism. I mean, it was a mindset you grew up with.

This is Stone in 2023. It was not just about John Wayne. It was about the TVs. On television were numerous shows, Westerns promoting heroism and violence. It was in movies. It was in TV. It was in comics, it was everywhere. It was just the American way of life.

It was like came along with your Wheaties. Stone's Born on the Fourth of July screenplay begins with Kovic as a bright-eyed, clean-cut young jock from the suburbs. It follows him to hell and back as he's wounded in Vietnam and ends with Kovic's transformation into a loud and long-haired anti-war hero. Stone finished his script in the late 70s, but he wasn't yet an established filmmaker. So the job of directing Born on the Fourth of July

went to William Friedkin, who'd made some of the coolest movies of the decade, like The Exorcist and The French Connection. Rehearsals soon got underway. But one day, not long before filming was set to begin, Kovic was summoned to a swank downtown hotel to meet Pacino. As soon as he saw the actor's face, Kovic could tell something was wrong. Pacino had shaved off his mustache. Sure enough, the movie was dead. A

victim of money issues, or Pacino issues, or possibly both. Whatever the reason, Kovic was crushed. As he told a reporter, my dream was dead. Stone was equally devastated. It just was heartbreaking. But Stone swore not to give up on the movie. Here's Kovic in 2005, recounting what Stone told him before the two men parted ways. That if he ever made it, if he ever broke through,

he would come back. He would make Born on the 4th of July. It would take more than a decade for Stone to follow through on his word. During those years, Ronald Reagan would come to power, the Memorial Wall would be brought to life, and millions of Americans would begin reflecting upon the long-term aftershocks of Vietnam, including many Americans who'd done their fighting back home. As a college student in New York City in the 60s, Naomi Foner spoke out frequently and fiercely about the war in Vietnam.

I was very involved in radical politics. Our entire purpose, I think, was to try and stop that war. Foner was one of the countless young people whose lives were transformed by Vietnam. She traveled to Washington, D.C. every month to attend political protests and marches, including the 1963 gathering in which Martin Luther King Jr. gave his landmark I Have a Dream speech. She also led a student activism group at Barnard College and watched as anti-war sentiment grew throughout the decade, reaching new heights when in 1969,

the U.S. government initiated the draft for the first time since World War II. We thought that that would invigorate the movement, it would cause a lot of political change, and it did. Because, you know, students made a lot of political change. And it did, because, you know, students made a lot of noise when that happened. After graduating from Barnard, and later Columbia University, Foner made her way to Hollywood and started a screenwriting career. She worked on several projects, but her breakthrough would have a direct connection to her activist past.

During the 60s, Foner's oldest childhood friend became a member of the Weather Underground, a radical anti-war group known for its controversial and confrontational methods. Because of her ties to the group, Foner's friend eventually had to go into hiding. Occasionally, I'd meet up with her somewhere and she was in disguise. She's wearing a wig. But there were also long stretches in which Foner didn't even know where her friend was. The thing that was interesting to me were the details. How did people survive? What did it mean to be underground?

In 1986, Foner was approached about a movie based on a real couple who'd been living underground for several years. They were discovered in upstate New York with their young children, and a basement full of weapons and explosives. Foner decided to spin the idea in a different direction. Her script, titled Running on Empty, follows a pair of ex-radicals, Arthur and Annie Pope, who bomb a napalm lab in 1971, while the Vietnam War is still raging. For the next 15 years, they elude the FBI by constantly changing their names,

their backstories, and their hometowns. But when the couple's teenage son starts thinking about life after high school, Arthur and Annie have to decide whether to stay hidden or break up the family and let him go. By the time she was writing Running on Empty, Foner had two young children of her own, Jake and Maggie, from her marriage to director Stephen Gyllenhaal. So she understood the obligations that parents feel to their kids. And enough years had passed to give Foner greater perspective on the 60s

and the way that decade had shaped her generation. You can't see something when you're right in the middle of it. It's just too much. I mean, it's sort of mimicked in Running on Empty in that these people have been on the run for a long time now, long enough to get a distance from what they did. In 1987, Foner's script found its way to Sidney Lumet, the director of such classics as Twelve Angry Men and Dog Day Afternoon. Lumet cast Judd Hirsch and Christine Lottie as Arthur and Annie Pope,

and for the role of Danny, their oldest son, he brought in River Phoenix. In the movie, Danny is stuck between two worlds. He can either help his parents stay underground, or he can strike out on his own, knowing that doing so will put his family in danger. If any movie demonstrates the degree to which the 80s became a political and

emotional referendum on the 60s, it's Running on Empty. Danny was just a little kid during Vietnam, but he's still paying the price for his parents' actions, still living in their shadows. And though the word Vietnam is barely even used in the movie, the aftershocks of the war and the protests it inspired reverberate across decades. And across generations. The most remarkable moment in Running on Empty takes place in an upscale restaurant. That's where Annie meets her long-estranged father, a wealthy industrialist played by future Law & Order star Stephen Hill.

The last thing I remember you saying to me was that I was an imperialist pig, personally responsible for the war, spread of poverty, racism. I was young. Yes. Yeah, you were young. He goes on, telling Annie that with all her beauty, all her talent, she was set up for this great life. And then he asks her a devastating question. telling Annie that with all her beauty, all her talent, she was set up for this great life.

And then he asks her a devastating question. My God, Annie, why did you throw it all away? The look on their faces, the mutual realization of just how much time they've lost, is devastating. It's too late to fix anything. They're just another family torn apart by what happened during Vietnam. Running on Empty got a small release in theaters in the fall of 1988. It didn't make a lot of money, but it won Foner a Golden Globe for her screenplay, as well as Oscar nominations for both her and Phoenix. More importantly, Running on Empty represents a quiet turning point in the history of Vietnam movies. It wasn't a reminder of the war's many tragedies, like Coming Home or The Deer Hunter. Nor was it a reckoning with

the horrors of combat, like Platoon. Instead, it was an attempt at reconciliation. A chance for viewers to understand the fellow Americans they might have once seen as enemies. The movie doesn't justify Arthur and Annie's crimes, but it doesn't condemn them either. It just shows how the past inevitably catches up with the present. That comes through clearly in the movie's final scene, which I'm about to ruin here. It takes place on a leafy roadside near the Jersey Turnpike. Arthur and Annie have come to realize the high cost of a life spent on the run. So Arthur decides to turn Danny loose,

knowing they may never see each other again. Now go out there and make a difference. You mother and I tried. And don't let anyone tell you any different. Danny gets on his bike and rides off. It's not his war anymore. Around the time Running on Empty was heading to theaters in 1988, Oliver Stone was getting ready to keep his promise to Ron Kovic. It was finally time to make Born on

the Fourth of July. Stone had kept busy since the movie first fell apart in the late 70s. Here's a quick recap. He picked up an Academy Award for writing Midnight Express, gave himself a James Wood-sized headache while filming Salvador, and then earned the world's attention with Platoon. Afterward, Stone had another hit with Wall Street, his Oscar-winning attack on modern capitalism. In Hollywood, speed, for lack of a better word, is good. And Stone jumped on the chance to make Born on the Fourth of July

his final film of the 80s. By then, Kovic's book was more than 10 years old. And in the years following its release, Americans had learned more about how difficult life had been for veterans after the war. Some struggled with nightmares, fits of rage, even suicidal urges. And as the years went on, more and more vets began asking for help. You know, they were having a lot of trouble being taken seriously, right? They were being labeled as mental cases and given the kinds of treatments which were not a great fit with what their experience was. That psychologist Joe Ruzek,

whom we met a few episodes ago, he specializes in traumatic stress and is the former director of the Dissemination and Training Division at the National Center for PTSD. The veterans themselves started to take things in their own hands and have rap groups and working with each other to sort out their own problems. Those talks led to the organization of veterans advocacy groups like the Vietnam Veterans of America, which formed in 1979. They also spurred a conversation about PTSD, which at the time was barely known outside of academic and medical circles. By 1980, the American Psychiatric Association would formally

acknowledge PTSD as a mental disorder. By definition, it could be applied to anyone who's experienced a distressing event that's, quote, outside the range of usual human experience. But despite the increased awareness of PTSD, Hollywood insisted on treating many Vietnam vet characters as ticking time bombs. That big screen stereotype had first taken hold in the 70s, but it exploded in the 80s. Action dramas with catchy titles like The Exterminator and The Park Is Mine depict vets who no longer fit into society, and who push back violently. And throughout the decade, you could even find stressed out or unpredictable Vietnam vet

characters in horror movies and comedies, even if their PTSD is reduced to a quick one-liner. This all gave Stone's Born on the Fourth of July movie extra urgency. The film would almost be a rebuttal to all those Vietnam vet cliches. The story of a man whose anger leads him not to commit violence, but to seek out peace. Ron Kovic would be a very different kind of big screen veteran, and Stone would need a very different breed of actor to play him. So it was inevitable that he turned to the most popular, most powerful, most intense movie star of the late 80s, Tom Cruise. It's hard to talk about modern-day Tom Cruise without getting too caught up in his many controversies. Like the time he ******, or that wild story about ******.

But 80s Tom Cruise? The best. He broke out in 1983's Risky Business, playing a big, grinning suburban teen who sets up a brothel in his parents' house. I know that movie probably hasn't aged well and that a lot of young listeners probably find it totally retrograde, but I'm sorry. I love Risky Business. I mean... Sometimes you gotta say, what the fuck? But the film that made Cruise the go-to wingman for millions of movie fans was Top Gun, the 1986 blockbuster in which he played a hotshot Navy pilot. After Top Gun, Cruise was one of the most sought-after actors in the world,

a total charm bot who could deliver an instant green light for a movie, and whose name all but guaranteed a big opening weekend. But at first, Stone wasn't sure he even wanted Cruise for Born on the Fourth of July. Sometimes you gotta say, Oliver Stone, what the fuck? I was worried because, one, he was a movie star and he was coming off Top Gun,

which was the opposite kind of jingoistic message. If you remember that movie correctly, it ends with going to war against the Russians. We're back to that again. It was a horrible ending message. It shows you that America loves aggression still. I mean, it's part of our lifeblood. Stone was also nervous that the film's grittiness would be undercut by Cruise's movie star likability.

You know, I didn't want a Hollywood version of it. And a lot of my friends said, yeah, you're going to, don't let him do this Hollywood crap. It's not a smiling, pretty boy picture at all. But the actor knew that playing Kovic would test him. And Cruz was up for a challenge. As he told one reporter, I could have made Top Gun three, four, five times

and made a lot of money. But I'm not interested in that. Instead, Cruise took a pay cut to play Kovic. That was no doubt a huge relief for executives at Universal Studios. Though they were spending a relatively modest amount on Born on the Fourth of July, about $18 million, Cruise was good box office insurance. And Stone soon got over his initial skepticism of Cruise, whose skills and intensity impressed the director. He's a great smiler, a great pretty boy, but he also has a very hard side, and I tried to bring that out.

But Kovic, the film's co-writer, needed a bit more convincing. He and Cruise met for the first time in early 1987. Kovic was living in Venice, California, and one day, a friend called him and said there was somebody outside trying to get a wheelchair out of a car. It was Cruz. Right away, Tom plunged into this and hung out with Ron in the Venice area,

wheeling himself around in the chair, trying to imitate Ron. And he took him into his heart, into his mind, and he became Ron. Cruise spent months using a wheelchair, trying to get a feel for Kovic's day-to-day life. If that sounds extreme, consider the alternative. On the director's commentary track for Born on the Fourth of July, Stone says he actually considered injecting Cruise with a substance that would briefly paralyze the actor from the waist down. Thankfully, the film's

insurers said no. But the point is, Cruise took his preparation for Born on the Fourth of July seriously. So did Stone, who had to find a way to condense entire decades of Kovic's life into less than three hours. The film tracks him from his idealistic teenage years. I want to go to Vietnam, and I'll die there if I have to. Through his struggles during and after the war. There's a lot to cover. Kovic gets stuck in a shit-stained VA hospital. He's called a traitor on the floor of the GOP convention. And he's misunderstood by his own family. In one scene, a frustrated Kovic, who's moved back home to live with his parents,

gets drunk and lashes out at his mom, played by Caroline Cava. By now, Kovic is rethinking his patriotism, his Catholicism, his whole existence. He's enraged and heartbroken. Communism, the insidious evil. They told us to go. That evil, they told us to go! That's what they told us!

Thou shalt not kill mom. Thou shalt not kill women and children. Thou shalt not kill, remember? Isn't that what you taught us? Isn't that what they taught us? In Born on the 4th of July, Kovic is presented as embittered, destructive, sometimes even cruel. But never without reason.

He suffers so many injustices that it's impossible not to feel for Kovic, no matter what you think of his politics. The anti-war stuff, look, I came home in the middle of that crap. And, you know, I had no time for those sort of people. That's retired Marine Corps Captain Dale Dye, whose voice you might recognize by now. He was an advisor on Born on the Fourth of July and played a small on-screen role. But it was part of the story, and I understood it.

But the real issue for me was what happened to Ron Kovic and others like him in these VA hospitals. They were just zoos. They were just garbage heaps. Seriously wounded veterans were thrown into these garbage heaps so people could forget about them. Nobody wanted to remember the war, and nobody wanted to remember that this is the cost of war. And that's the reason I wanted to do that picture. Born on the Fourth of July premiered in theaters in December 1989. Even though it didn't reach the cultural heights of Platoon,

it was a hit in its own right. An unflinching, R-rated, two and a half hour long drama that managed to make 70 million dollars in the U.S. alone. The film earned Stone his second Oscar for directing, as well as Golden Globes for him, Cruise and Kovic, the man who'd first written his memoirs in a tiny Southern California room a decade earlier. Seeing his life on the screen had been hard for Kovic. When he watched the film for the first time, there were moments so painful he had to turn away. But it ultimately made him proud, and hopeful.

As he explained to a reporter, young kids can sit in the same theaters we sat in 30 years ago with their popcorn and watch the movie the way we watched John Wayne and it's going to change their mind about war. And a new war was coming, sooner than anyone could have realized. On the evening of January 16, 1991, President George H.W. Bush addressed the nation from his desk in the Oval Office. Just two hours ago, Allied Air Forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. These attacks continue as I speak. The showdown between the U.S. and Iraq had been looming for months.

In August 1990, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein sent troops into Kuwait, a small neighboring country known for its vast oil fields. When it became clear Hussein's military wasn't going to go quietly, Bush and several other world leaders opted to use force. And by early 1991, nearly half a million U.S. troops were in the Persian Gulf. America had spent the last decade dealing with the fallout of Vietnam. And now, the country was gearing up for yet another fight in a faraway land. But Bush made a promise.

This time, things would be different. This will not be another Vietnam. And I repeat this here tonight. Our troops will have the best possible support in the entire world, and they will not be asked to fight with one hand tied behind their back. In the days and weeks ahead, millions of Americans would watch Operation Desert Storm unfold on TV. New York filmmaker Nancy Savoka was one of them. And as she watched, she couldn't help but think, here we go again. Savoka was just a kid during Vietnam. She grew up in a working class area of the Bronx, and many of her neighbors wound up serving. My neighbors had a son who was a Marine, and he would come and visit my sisters who were teenagers who would kind of drool over his Marine uniform. And it was all so formal and

kind of beautiful and cool. And I knew that they were going off to go somewhere to do some good work. And that's kind of my earliest memories of these big, tall guys dressed up to do something amazing. As Savoka got older, though, the toll of the war became clear. I was friends with this little girl and she had seven older brothers. And three of the brothers went, were drafted. Oh, my gosh. And yeah, so one did not return. He died there.

One came back and he just was very quiet. He was a very different personality from the wacky guy, you know, Bronx neighborhood kid that left. At the time the Persian Gulf War began, Savoka was editing a film about a kid leaving for Vietnam, a gentle romance titled Dogfight.

Set in 1963, it stars River Phoenix as Birdlace, a young Marine who's about to be shipped off to Southeast Asia. Before that can happen, though, Birdlace and his fellow Marines are given a free night in San Francisco. That's where Birdlace meets Rose, a shy waitress and aspiring folk singer played by Lily Taylor. As the night goes on, Birdlace opens up to Rose,

and the two very quietly fall for each other. At one point, he tells her about his final destination, a distant country called Vietnam. I'll just be there as advisors to teach them how to take care of the commies. That could be dangerous.

Nah, kick a little ass, take a few names, be back in a couple of months. Dogfight was written by Bob Comfort, a Vietnam vet who based the screenplay on his own time as a Marine. And even though the film was released by Warner Brothers, Dogfight

has that great 90s indie vibe. It's a one-night-out story, a film heavy on conversations and connections. And despite being about Vietnam, Dogfight only features a few quick scenes of combat, in which Birdlace watches one of his best friends die. Afterward, he returns to San Francisco, where he realizes that some of his fellow Americans aren't eager to have him back. First, he's harassed by a passing hippie. Hey man, how many babies did you kill? Then there's a quick trip to a dive bar

where a group of older men men who lived through World War II and had maybe even served themselves learn that Birdlace is back from combat. You a Marine? Yes, sir. Good now? Yeah. Yeah. Bummer.

One of the guys buys Birdlace a drink, but the men can barely look him in the eye. He's a walking reminder of a conflict they don't want to acknowledge. Afterward, Birdlace finally walks across the street and reunites with Rose. He can hardly speak, and neither can she. It's a lovely moment, but also

a deeply painful one, because Birdlace's challenges are just beginning. These scenes are reminiscent of what Savoka witnessed in her own neighborhood after Vietnam. Some kids came home angry. Others, she says, were ghostly, barely even there. And as Savoka watched Operation Desert Storm begin, she worried history was repeating itself. Here she was, editing a movie about the boys she saw head off to a foreign war, while a new generation of soldiers were gearing up for their own fight. It all felt uncomfortably familiar. It's always the young people that go out, you know.

But unlike the war depicted in Dogfight, the conflict in the Persian Gulf would come to a quick end. In late February of 1991, General Stormin Norman Schwarzkopf, leader of the coalition in Iraq, announced that Hussein's forces had been driven from Kuwait a mere six weeks after Bush first addressed the nation. It had been a high-tech, high-speed war, and as far as many Americans were concerned, a victorious one, with fewer than 150 U.S. casualties. Bush had been right. This wasn't another Vietnam. A few weeks later, a plane carrying the first group of returning U.S. soldiers touched down at an airfield in Savannah, Georgia. They were greeted as heroes. A high school marching band played as people waved flags and held signs saying, welcome home. Wives and kids rushed in for hugs. And in the middle of all this,

Brigadier General Terry Scott, the first man off the plane, spoke to the press. I'd like to tell the American people how much we appreciate your support, your prayers, and your confidence. Scenes like this would play out throughout America, where the Persian Gulf War had been wildly popular. During Operation Desert Storm, sales of U.S. flags took off, and many Americans began wearing yellow ribbons, a sign of support for the troops, who were welcomed with open arms.

As one American told a reporter, I didn't want us to get into the blame-the-soldiers problem that happened during Vietnam. And honestly, no one did. I was a young teenager when this was all happening. And like pretty much every other kid in my school, I didn't want the returning troops to be treated the way they had after Vietnam. We hadn't even lived through that time.

But we had witnessed it secondhand through the movies. And I've always wondered, did the decades worth of movies about returning Vietnam vets, movies like The Deer Hunter or Coming Home or Born on the Fourth of July, impact how Americans view the troops coming home in 1991? It's an extremely naive question. So I put it to the one person I knew would give me a no bullshit answer. Dale Dye. He didn't disappoint. Do you think that was at all informed by having all these Vietnam movies in the years before? Of course it was. It doesn't take a genius to recognize knee jerk.

And that's exactly what it was. We'll never let happen to these kids what happened to the guys in Vietnam. I think it embarrassed the American public to some extent that we did this. And if Vietnam veterans and their suffering after the war, their misperception after the war, made any great contribution, that's probably it. We'll never let that happen to our veterans again. The success of Operation Desert Storm, and I get that success is a very debatable term here, had several immediate consequences. Bush got a ratings bump, Lee Greenwood's ballad God Bless the USA played on the radio non-stop, and moviegoers began losing their interest in Vietnam. Oliver Stone had seen this coming. Throughout the 80s, he'd watched the country take an increasingly

aggressive foreign policy stance, with Ronald Reagan sending troops to Granada and Bush overseeing an invasion of Panama. In between came the collapse of the Berlin Wall, an event that would end the decades-long Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. There was again a jingoistic mood. The Russian Empire had vanished, and here we are on top of the world. Americans were feeling good about themselves and their country. And they didn't want to be bummed out by Vietnam movies anymore. As the 90s went on, you could see that at the box office. Several pricey Vietnam dramas for The Boys, The War, Flight of the Intruder, either underperformed or downright bombed.

As for John Rambo, he'd been left behind in the 80s, along with Chuck Norris' missing in action franchise. In a way, the culture was going back to where it was in the mid-70s, when movies like Coming Home were struggling to get made. But a handful of filmmakers were about to take a few final swings at Vietnam, including Stone himself. Peace is not the end of war. Between a man and a woman. Between heaven and earth. Released in late 1993, Heaven and Earth is the last film in what Stone calls his Vietnam trilogy. It's the true story of Lely

Hayslip, who experienced extraordinary hardship coming of age in the Vietnam War. There's no way I can summarize Hayslip's life in a quick sentence or two. You should really just get her first memoir, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, and let her tell you the story instead. But even a condensed version of Hayslip's life story is harrowing. Raised on a rice farm, she was barely in her teens when American forces entered her country. Hayslip soon got caught up in the conflict between North and South Vietnam. And in the years that followed, Hayslip endured torture and sexual assault before marrying an American contractor and relocating to the United States in 1970. It was a painful transition. Haislip faced resistance from her own in-laws,

who were part of a large military family. So every evening we get together for dinner or for tea, for what the news. And when they see the American get killed or wounded and put in a body bag and put it on airplane, they look at me and say, shame on you. Shame on you people. She tried to push back. They look at me and they say, why you people like to fight?

Why you like the war so much? We don't like the war. We did not ask for the war. It just happened in our village, our land. We have't like the war. We did not ask for the war. It just happened in our village, our land. We have to fight back. Over the next several years, Hayslip would face more hardships in the U.S., including the deaths of two husbands. But she ultimately found some stability by running a successful restaurant in San Diego. And as the years went on, she started reading American books about the war

and began watching American movies. My question keeps coming to my mind is, what do these people know about our people? What do these American people know about our country, our culture, and our tradition, and who we are? Haislip had been taking notes about her life in Vietnam for years. She wanted people to understand her past, and her country's past. In the late 80s, she began writing a memoir with author Jay Wurtz. The resulting book, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, was released in 1989. It cuts back and forth between Haislip's time during the war

and her eventual return to Vietnam more than a decade later. Haislip's memoir is immersive, intense, and thoroughly heartbreaking. It eventually found its way to Stone, who wanted to make a movie about Haislip's life. In a way, the two had a history together. Haislip had seen Platoon when it opened wide in 1987. She didn't object to the film. She just felt it didn't tell the whole story of Vietnam. So Haislip printed up flyers that she handed out near her local theater in San Diego. Flyers that posed a tough question to the Americans heading in and out of Platoon. The question was 58,000 Americans, men and women, die in Vietnam. How about 3 million to 5 million Vietnamese?

Haislip was nervous about putting her life on film, so she gave Stone some ultimatums. He had to promise that Heaven and Earth would be nothing like his recent rock biopic The Doors, which Haislip felt had way too much sex. Stone also had to pledge that his film would be nothing like the Rambo series, which Hayslip felt was demeaning to Vietnamese people. We are human beings. We fight for our country, our motherland, our freedom. Rambo did not represent any of that category.

Stone wasn't looking to make anything like Rambo. He wanted to tell a story with a Vietnamese character front and center. And in the early 90s, a time when moviegoers were losing interest in Vietnam films, Stone had the power to get it done. I mean, after Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, who was going to say no to a new Oliver Stone movie about Vietnam?

I was hot as a pistol, as they say. They didn't think it was going to be that great of a hit, but they went with me. Stone got a healthy $23 million budget for Heaven and Earth, more than three times what he had for Platoon. And he hired Hayslip to work on the film, a sweeping epic that would span years, tracing her life from Vietnam to the United States. For the lead, Stone cast Hip Ti Le, a newcomer who, like Hayslip, had fled Vietnam to the United States. For the lead, Stone cast Hip Ti Le, a newcomer who, like Hayslip, had fled Vietnam for the United States when she was younger.

Tommy Lee Jones would star as a fictional U.S. military man named Steve Butler, who falls for Hayslip during his tour of duty, the beginning of a tumultuous relationship. Is this your little brother? What? Is this handsome little boy your relative? My son. Oh, of course he is. relationship. Heaven and Earth would dramatize much of the trauma Hayslip endured during her early life, both as a villager in Vietnam and as an out-of-her-elmen housewife in suburban America. That's where she's constantly patronized by her new sister-in-her-elm and housewife in suburban America. That's where

she's constantly patronized by her new sister-in-law, played by Conchata Farrell. Come on, Lee. It's Thanksgiving. You can eat. Think of all those starving children in Vietnam. Stone's film concludes with Hayslip returning to Vietnam to reunite with her family. It's a moment of uplift in a tough film. So tough, audiences all but ignored Heaven and Earth when it was released in late 1993. Critics were even less supportive. I got slaughtered. So much work went into that movie. It was a beautiful movie for me. And a transformative one as well, for both him and Haislip. Before filming began, she'd brought Stone on a tour of her home village in Vietnam.

Stone had recently become interested in Buddhism, so Hayslip brought him to a temple not far from where she'd grown up. It was a brief bit of stillness in a country that had defined so much of their lives. When he walked out, I could see that he was really changed. He was much softer, much peaceful, and much calm. Heaven and Earth would be Stone's last word on Vietnam. But before the 90s were over, and before the Vietnam movie boom ended for good,

Hollywood would deliver two final big studio spectacles about the war. They came from different generations of filmmakers and took very different views of Vietnam. One movie pulled at old wounds. The other sought to heal them. My name's Forrest Gump. People call me Forrest Gump. Forrest Gump, the movie, was born on the 6th of July, 1994, and became, somehow, one of the biggest movies of the decade.

If you haven't seen it since it came out, trust me when I say that Gump is a bit goofier than you remember. A little bit darker too. Kind of like the 90s itself. Anyway, the movie follows Gump, a kind-hearted, slow-witted fella played by Tom Hanks, as he stumbles from one world-changing 20th century historical event to the next. That includes a tour of duty in Vietnam, a journey that riffs on all the Vietnam films that came before. There's the wall-to-wall tunes from Jimi Hendrix and Creedence Clearwater Revival, the combat scenes that turn lush green landscapes into blazing infernos. There's even a belligerent drill instructor, played by Efemo Umulami, who marvels at Gump's ability to put together his weapons so quickly.

Jesus H. Christ! This is a new company record. If it wouldn't be a waste of such a damn fine enlisted men, I'd recommend you for OCS, Private Gump. You are going to be a general someday, Gump. Now, disassemble your weapon and continue. During his time in Vietnam, Gump rescues several of his fellow soldiers during a firefight. But he's unable to help his best friend, Bubba, who's played by Michael T. Williamson, and who dies in Gump's arms.

Of course, I just helped him. He got shot. Gump tries to make sense of what he's seen. He's just lost his best friend, one of the many young men whose lives were cut short by the war. Bub was going to be a shrimp and buck captain, but instead he died right there by that river in Vietnam. While in Vietnam, Gump also meets Lieutenant Dan Taylor,

his gruff but caring platoon leader. Gump rescues Lieutenant Dan during an intense battle, but he can't prevent an explosion from taking his friend's legs. Afterward, while in the hospital, Lieutenant Dan, played by Gary Sinise, lashes out at Gump. This wasn't supposed to happen. Not to me. I had a destiny. I was Lieutenant Dan Taylor.

Gump tries to comfort his friend. You steal, Lieutenant Dan. Forrest Gump was directed by Robert Zemeckis, who was in his late teens and early 20s when America was still in Southeast Asia. When it comes to Vietnam, neither Forrest Gump, the man, nor Forrest Gump, the movie, offers an answer to Bubba's question, the same question that plagued Zemeckis' generation.

Why did this happen? But the movie does track the effects of the war, mostly through Lieutenant Dan. After he returns home, Lieutenant Dan struggles with alcohol, grows his hair long, and wheels angrily around New York City, behavior that no doubt reminded many of Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July. But by the end of Forrest Gump, Lieutenant Dan, after a long stint working with Gump on his shrimping boat, has accepted his destiny. He's now clean-cut, rich, engaged to be married, and walking again. Gump is awestruck.

Yeah, I got new legs. Custom-made. Titanium alloy. It's what they use on the space shuttle. This is a much happier ending than the one offered up in Born on the Fourth of July, or Dogfight, or really any movie involving life after Vietnam. And if you'd met me on an AOL message board in 1995, I'd probably be pointing out that Forrest Gump sometimes feels like a happy reboot of the Vietnam era. A chance for baby boomers to wave away the bad parts of the 60s with one hand and pat themselves on the back with the other. But I like Hanks in this movie, and I like Sinise too. And besides, pretending you're too cool for Forrest Gump is its own form of generational

smugness. Instead, I'll just point out that the movie's numerous achievements—six Oscars, more than $300 million at the box office—s, suggests that by the mid-'90s, audiences wanted their Vietnam films to go down easy. All of which would present a challenge to the last big Vietnam movie of the decade, a violent, over-the-top tale of one vet pushed to his limits. From the directors of Menace to Society,

Dead Presidents, a Hughes Brothers film. Well, that's Uncle Sam for you, baby. Money to burn. Even in a decade full of hot shit directors, Albert and Alan Hughes stood out. The twin brothers were barely in their 20s when they made their debut with Menace to Society, a gnarly L.A. crime flick that became a surprise hit in 1993.

Afterward, the Hughes Brothers rushed headfirst into Dead Presidents. It was inspired by a book called Bloods, an oral history of the Vietnam War by black veterans. Bloods was written by Wallace Terry, who interviewed several black soldiers about their experiences during and after the war. Dead Presidents would be a fictionalized account of some of those experiences. The movie focuses on a young Bronx teenager named Anthony, who encounters horrific violence while serving in Vietnam. He returns home alienated and angry, and eventually teams up with some of his fellow vets for

a bank robbery that goes spectacularly wrong. With Dead Presidents, the Hughes brothers would get the biggest budget of their young careers, $10 million, courtesy of Disney. But Hughes would put that money toward a tale of post-Vietnam life rarely seen on screen. They wanted to tell a story about the Vietnam experience. That's actor Lorenz Tate, who first worked with the Hughes brothers in Menace to Society

and was later cast as Anthony in Dead Presidents. How it affected those war vets who put their lives on the line and came back home. In particular, black, African-American war vets who were treated one way in America, and they go overseas and treated another way. They come back home feeling like they're heroes. But then they were still marginalized. Tate was born the same year America pulled out of Saigon. But he'd heard about Vietnam from his uncle, who served as a Marine.

He willingly went. And I would hear about some of the stories from him or just sort of overhearing because he suffered from PTSD. He definitely had those nightmares. And I always wondered, what was that about? You know, why was he so triggered and why was he suffering from, you know, these issues because of the war? In addition to learning about Vietnam from his uncle, Tate studied classic Vietnam films of the 70s and 80s, something the Hughes brothers encouraged. The directors were big-time movie obsessives who kept an Apocalypse Now poster on the wall of their Hollywood studio. For dead presidents, Alan Hughes even compiled his

favorite Vietnam movie scenes onto a VHS tape, which he played in his trailer for inspiration. They always provided videotapes for us So I watched Full Metal Jacket I watched Apocalypse Now I watched Platoon We watched these movies over and over With Dead Presidents, you can tell the Hughes did their Vietnam movie homework The post-war isolation of the Deer Hunter The bloody combat of Platoon

Even the majestic helicopter shots from Apocalypse Now They're all embedded in the DNA of dead presidents. But so are blaxploitation films and gangster sagas. All of it held together not by classic rock anthems, but by non-stop 70s soul. Before filming began in late 1994, the Hughes brothers sent cast members off to train with Dale Dye, the man who'd put Oliver Stone's platoon actors through fake hell and back.

During several muggy days and freezing cold nights in Florida, the dead president's actors lived off rations, dug holes for toilets, and listened to Dye's war stories. What he says, that really stood out to me. In war, when you take a life from someone, you never forget their faces. Every one of them. It doesn't matter how long it is, how long it's been, you never forget their faces. In Dead Presidents, Anthony heads off to war with an old buddy of his named Skip, a sly and cynical college dropout played by Chris Tucker.

Once in Vietnam, Skip warns Anthony about getting too caught up in the war. Man, fuck this shit, man. Come on, man. Man, this ain't our war, man. Y'all black asses should be back in the Bronx where we belong. When they return from the war, which the Hughes brothers depict with shocking violence, Anthony has trouble adjusting to his new life in the Bronx, where drugs and crime rule the streets. After he loses his job, Anthony's approached by two old buddies, Kirby, a Korean war vet played by platoon's Keith David, and Jose, a fellow Vietnam

vet played by Freddy Rodriguez. They want to pull off a daring armored car robbery, and they want Anthony to be in charge. I put up the guns. I get the money together to get the plans going. But you got to be the master planner. You got medals for blowing motherfuckers up out there, man. I heard you were like John Wayne. On the morning of the robbery, Anthony's crew members grab their guns, paint their faces a spooky shade of white, and try to get away with the cash. But things go disastrously wrong, resulting in multiple deaths. Anthony gets away, but he's ultimately caught and brought before a judge, played by Apocalypse Now star Martin Sheen.

The judge served in World War II, which he calls a real war. When he hands down his sentence, you can feel his disdain not just for Anthony, but for the Vietnam generation as a whole. He is a disgrace to everyone that has ever put on that uniform, and I will not permit you or him to use the Vietnam War as a cop-out here. Dead Presidents ends with Anthony getting 15 years to life. By this point, most of his friends are dead, including Skip, who overdoses on heroin after the robbery. Dead Presidents isn't just the last big Vietnam film of the 90s.

It's also one of the bleakest, a reminder of the struggles many veterans faced when they returned home. Coming back was like, I'm going to go back and see my family, and that'll be great. And I was happy to be home. But then again, home was troublesome. I mean, the whole situation was worse than when I left. That's David Moraine, the Vietnam vet and documentary filmmaker we met a few episodes ago.

He enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1965 and served for four years. Decades later, in the fall of 1995, Moraine went to a theater to see Dead Presidents. From the moment the film began, he couldn't believe how much it echoed his own life. I served in 3rd Force Recon, and that was the portrayal of a reconnaissance company. I come from the Bronx. The movie is based in the Bronx. When I was a kid, my nickname was Skip.

The similarities didn't end there. Like Anthony, Moraine hadn't recognized his hometown when he returned from Vietnam. The change that I saw in my neighborhood was horrific. You know, the kids who were my age and younger were already dead. Others were in jail. And he too had kept in close touch with his fellow Marines after the war. We all had issues when we came back. So we have helped each other over the years by being that tight. To be clear, the more extreme elements of dead presidents had no relation to Moraine's life. But Anthony's day-to-day challenges? Those he'd seen firsthand. He doesn't know exactly what to do, and what he is doing isn't paying off. So his rage at his

inability to do what he needs to do gets projected out. So it leads to a bad scene. Watching Dead Presidents in the theater that day, Moraine was stunned. He really knew this movie. Or maybe the movie knew him. The first time I saw it, it was like, you know, it was almost like, are you crazy? Are you imagining this? I thought I was losing my grip because of the parallels. Dead Presidents still resonates with moviegoers today, even those who weren't around when the movie came out.

The film was never a huge box office hit, but like so many out-there and ambitious 90s films, it found a cult following on home video. Here's Lorenz Tate again. To this day, there hasn't really been a movie that really had all of the things that really allowed us to see the level and the quality of, you know, what that experience was like for Black people and black men. Dead Presidents also proved just how much the Vietnam movie, and moviemaking in general, had evolved in nearly three decades. The Hughes brothers had absorbed all the classic Vietnam films from the 70s and 80s.

And with Dead Presidents, they were jamming those older movies through the hyper-violent, ultra-referential lens of 90s cinema. Stylistically and culturally, Dead Presidents was about as far from the Green Berets as a movie could get, and it would serve as the explosive finale of the modern Vietnam movie boom. Hollywood never fully abandoned Vietnam. In the last 20 years, there have been tough-minded documentaries like The Fog of War, dark comedies like Tropic Thunder, and post-war dramas like Spike Lee's The Five Bloods.

But by the late 90s, it was clear that audiences had moved on, or rather reverted back, to another world-changing battle. You and I are taking a squad over to Newville on a public relations mission. For you leaving a squad? Some private in the 101st lost three brothers and he's got a ticket home. How come Newville? In July of 1998, I watched Saving Private Ryan in a theater with a pair of World War II veterans. I was writing a newspaper story about the movie and asked them to come along and share their reactions.

They'd both seen plenty of films about the war. In fact, one had even been an extra in John Wayne's 1962 hit, The Longest Day. But Saving Private Ryan was way more intense than the World War II classics of the past. Directed by Steven Spielberg, it stars Tom Hanks as a middle-aged army captain sent to find a young paratrooper behind enemy lines. Saving Private Ryan's best-known sequence is a gory, nerve-wracking

recreation of D-Day. American forces storm the shores at Utah Beach, where they're immediately met by enemy fire. The two vets and I sat there quietly, watching young American soldiers fall to the ground over and over again. Saving Private Ryan was unlike anything we'd ever seen. A big-budget, full-color recreation of a bloody battle that, for many Americans, had always been remembered in black and white. It was a new kind of war movie. And over the next year,

Saving Private Ryan would go on to earn close to half a billion dollars worldwide. It also spearheaded Hollywood's World War II revival. Saving Private Ryan would be followed by The Thin Red Line, director Terrence Malick's slow-burning drama about American soldiers in the Pacific. And before the 90s ended, a flurry of new World War II films slowly got underway. Windtalkers, Hearts War, Pearl Harbor,

they'd all be given massive budgets and A-list stars. So would HBO's ambitious and expensive miniseries Band of Brothers. Timing-wise, their arrival made perfect sense. It had been more than 50 years since World War II ended, an ideal moment to look back. And with the country about to enter an exciting, but also kind of terrifying, new century, these films would be reminders of a conflict that, unlike Vietnam, ended in American victory. For all the horrors of World War II, it was a war that

Americans could mostly feel good about. But Saving Private Ryan is not a clean-cut tale of triumph. For all the bravery it depicts on screen, the movie is grittier and bloodier than the World War II epics of the past. It had to be. By the time Saving Private Ryan was released, moviegoers had spent two decades being confronted by the likes of Apocalypse Now and Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. The kind of rah-rah World War II tales that Hollywood had sold in the 40s and 50s wouldn't work on audiences in the 90s. Some Americans had grown up with Vietnam,

others with Vietnam movies. But they'd all learned, one way or the other, that war is hell. That message came through loud and clear in Saving Private Ryan. And after spending a few hours being pulverized by the film, the two World War II vets and I stood around the parking lot. They wanted a few minutes to decompress. Both were D-Day survivors, and I'd worried the film's violence had upset them. But they told me they liked Saving Private Ryan,

and they wanted young people to watch it. Not so they could revel in America's past, but so they could learn from it. If they see that, one of the vets said, they ain't never going to want to go to war. We're now just a couple years away from the 50th anniversary of America leaving Vietnam. That hectic day in April 1975, when North Vietnamese forces started rolling into Saigon, and U.S. helicopters began flying out. Inside the building, the evacuees were broken into groups of 50, and then it was a mad dash out the door into the parking lot.

I doubt Hollywood will mark that anniversary the way it marked the end of World War II. More than ever, big studio Hollywood wants to play it safe. And spending tens of millions of dollars on a big movie about a painful and long-ago war like Vietnam seems like the opposite of a sure thing. I can't imagine a studio exec greenlighting a Vietnam version of Saving Private Ryan. And to be honest, I can't imagine moviegoers showing up either.

The 21st century had barely begun when 9-11 plunged America into a new series of seemingly never-ending wars, including major conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. And in the years that followed, those wars did inspire some hit films, The Hurt Locker, American Sniper, Lone Survivor, Zero Dark Thirty. But for the most part, Americans haven't shown too much interest in movies about these new conflicts, which have played out non-stop on cable TV and on the internet. What we've seen has been shocking, confusing, and divisive. And as producer and studio exec Mike Medavoy told us, Hollywood doesn't like being divisive. Look, most movie studios do not want to get into conflict. What's to be gained?

How many people will come? You know, who's going to want to see it? Medavoy was talking about the Vietnam era, the period when studios wanted nothing to do with an unpopular war. But he could just as easily be describing any era of Hollywood history since 9-11, including today. With the entertainment industry in a constant state of crisis, and the country in a constant state of agitation, why make movies about a war, any war, that people are still fighting about? When I began working on this show, it had been at least a decade since I'd revisited many of the Vietnam movies I'd seen as a teenager. And I can't even remember the last time I dove into the history of the war itself, much of which I'd forgotten. So I started out with the same hope I had when I was younger.

That I could learn about Vietnam, a war that ended before I was born, from Vietnam movies. That didn't happen. I know I've said this before, but movies aren't history lessons. Something that became clear with every film I watched. It's impossible to fit the complex, decades-long relationship between America and Vietnam into a two-hour movie. The best these films can do, and many of the Vietnam films do it extremely well, is immerse you in a moment in time, whether that moment takes place during basic training, or on is immerse you in a moment in time, whether that moment takes place during basic training, or on the battlefield, or in a VA hospital. And as far as why and how so many Americans wound up in those places, well, for those kind of details, you're better off just

picking up a book, or better yet, talking to someone who was actually there. But there's another reason why even the best Vietnam films feel incomplete. They often ignore or dismiss the Vietnamese people themselves. I watched probably 50 Hollywood films about Vietnam for this show, and at a certain point, I lost count of how many unnamed soldiers I'd seen getting mowed down by gunfire, of how many female characters I'd seen reduced to nothing more than sex objects. These movies were largely made by and about American white men, a narrow perspective for such a panoramic war. And the histories they tell of the Vietnam War,

no matter how well-intentioned, will always be just a small part of a much bigger story. But while these movies don't present a complete picture of the Vietnam War, they can tell you quite a bit about those who endured it. And those personal stories can change the way you might view an abstract, decades-old war. It's impossible to watch Born on the Fourth of July without feeling not just for Ron Kovic, but for the countless other returning vets whose lives were shattered by the war. And you can't sit through heaven and earth without being affected by what happened to Lely Haislip, both as a young woman in Vietnam and as one of the many Vietnamese refugees who came to America.

Even a fictitious story, like Running on Empty, plugs you into the lives of two people who fought hard against the war and had to pay for their actions for years. I'm not naive enough to believe that movies can ever truly make you understand the lives of others. But I am naive enough to believe that movies have a transportive power, and that the best ones connect us with people, places, and moments we otherwise never would have known. And sometimes, they can even reconnect us to moments we thought we'd never know again. I'm sure you remember Q Chin, the acclaimed Vietnamese-American actor we met at the very beginning of the show. Years before she watched the fall of Saigon

and then fled to the U.S., she was a young girl living with her father. Chin's mother and her newborn brother had been killed during World War II when Allied forces seeking out Japanese troops bombed parts of Hanoi. My father was very young. He was only 31 years old. Chin's father did whatever he could to keep his daughter happy. He took me out every weekend to see movies.

You know, at that time, there's no TV. You know, at home, it's different for a young single father. Her father had a private lounge in a big, beautiful movie palace in Hanoi. It showed Hollywood movies in French, which Chin's father translated for her. One day, they caught a recent black-and-white hit

from America, The Best Years of Our Lives. You may remember that film from earlier in our series. they caught a recent black-and-white hit from America, The Best Years of Our Lives. You may remember that film from earlier in our series. It's a beautifully told story of three Americans trying to adjust to life after World War II. I remember that movie, that I cried so much. Here was a movie, made in a different language, and set thousands of miles away in America, that understood the pain and loneliness the war had brought to Chin's life, and would continue to bring in the years ahead.

It's just like a sign, what's going to happen to us. Not long afterward, Chin's country would be divided into North and South, and she would be forced to leave her father, never to see him again. But the best years of our lives would always bring her back to Hanoi, not just to those moments of war, but to those quiet moments of peace in between. So that was the best year of my father and my life. This is Do We Get to Win This Time?

How Hollywood Made the Vietnam War. Written and reported by me, Brian Raftery. The executive producers are Bill Simmons, Juliette Lippman, and Sean Fennessy. Our story editor is Amanda Dobbins. The show was produced by Devin Manzi, Mike Wargon, and Vikram Patel. Fact-checking by Dan Comer. Copy editing by Craig Gaines. Talent booking by Kat Spillane. Thank you. by David Shoemaker. Special thanks to everyone at The Ringer for helping to make this show happen, and to my family for putting up with me watching violent war movies at 5 in the morning.

Special thanks also go to Noah Malale, Ryan the No Mercy Man Walker, and Sean Howe. And thanks to you, most of all, for listening. This episode originally included a few factual errors about Risky Business and Top Gun. We said that Risky Business came out in 1982. In fact, it came out in 1983, which I should note because I had that on Blu-ray. Also, we said that Tom Cruise was an Air Force pilot in Top Gun. In that film, he was a Navy pilot.

Anyway, we've updated this episode to reflect the corrections.