1968 - Mark Kurlansky [33]
The print media was also giving more attention to the war than they ever had before. Harper’s magazine and the Atlantic Monthly put out special Vietnam War issues. Harper’s entire March issue, on sale in February, was devoted to a Norman Mailer article about the antiwar movement that powerfully criticized U.S. policy. Atlantic Monthly’s entire March issue was devoted to a piece by Dan Wakefield also about antiwar sentiment. Though both magazines were more than a century old and neither had ever done single-article issues, both said it was a coincidence that they were producing such issues at the same time on the same subject.
Photography was being used in this February explosion of media as it rarely had been before. The normally black-and-white Time magazine used color. The Tet Offensive happened to coincide with an internal debate at The New York Times. The photo department wanted the paper to use more than occasional small and usually cropped pictures, and after much arguing, the Times agreed that if they were supplied with pictures worthy of it, they would give a big picture spread.
Photographer Eddie Adams was roaming Saigon in morning light with an NBC crew when he came upon Vietnamese marines with a man in tow, his arms tied behind his back, badly beaten. Suddenly Adams saw the chief of South Vietnam National Police, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, draw his sidearm. The prisoner turned a downcast eye as General Loan held his arm straight out and fired a bullet into the man’s head. Adams had photographed it all. He developed the pictures and placed them on the drum of an electronic scanner that sent them to New York and around the world. The Times agreed that these were unusual pictures worthy of a different kind of spread. On February 2 a photo ran on the top of the front page of a small man, hands bound, face distorted by the impact of a bullet from the handgun in General Loan’s outstretched arm. Below ran another picture of a South Vietnamese soldier, grief on his face as he carried his child, killed by the Viet Cong. On page twelve was more—three pictures marked “Prisoner,” “Execution,” and “Death,” showing the Adams sequence of the killing. These photos won more than ten photojournalism awards and were and still are among the most remembered images of the war.
The world was learning what this war looked like in more detail than had ever happened in the history of warfare. Later in the year, John Wayne released a film on Vietnam, The Green Berets, starring and co-directed by himself. Renata Adler, reviewing for The New York Times, declared the film “stupid,” “false,” and “unspeakable.” Richard Schickel in Life magazine agreed with all of these adjectives but further stated, “The war being fought here bears no resemblance whatever to the reality of Vietnam as we have all, hawks and doves alike, perceived it to be through the good offices of the mass media.” Neither John Wayne nor any other American filmmaker had ever needed to contend with this before. Up until then, most war films did not look like the real thing, but now, even if the war was in a distant land, the public would know because it had seen the war.
1968 was the first year Hollywood filmmakers were permitted an unrestricted hand in the portrayal of violence. Censorship regulations were replaced by a ratings system so that Hollywood warfare could be portrayed looking as gruesome as network television war, though the first films to use the new violence, such as the 1968 police thriller Bullitt and the 1969 western The Wild Bunch, were not war movies.
Another problem with war films was that every day the public was picking up better war stories in the news media than they could find in the Hollywood war clichés. The fast talker from Brooklyn and the quiet “What are you going to do after the war?” scene did not stand up to real stories such as that of Marine Private Jonathan Spicer, a funny, offbeat son of a Methodist minister