"Da 5 Bloods", some thoughts
Reacting to Viet Than Nguyen's review of Spike Lee's "Da 5 Bloods". I can sympathize with Nguyen's compulsion to watch "Vietnam movies", and his reactions to them. When I was a child, my family and I watched a lot of war movies. This was in the 1950s and 1960s, and therefore, most of the war movies were about World War II, a few were about WW I and Korea: "Sergeant York", "The Fighting 69th", "Men In War". This was, perhaps, "normal" since war has always been a popular subject for the movies, and TV, and my father was a veteran who fought in Italy. The only thing I remember him saying about Italy, when asked about the Italians, was, "they were starving."
For me, there were two kinds of war movies, movies about the European theater and movies about the Pacific theater. Movies about the European theater, were to me, real war movies: they were about men fighting each other. In that sense, they were not that different from knights fighting each other, or cowboys fighting each other, cops and robbers.... But when it came to the Pacific theater, something was different. This is not simply because the Pacific war seems to have been fought primarily in jungles as opposed to the European towns, forests and fields, but because the enemy was Japanese, and I was Japanese (though born in America, as were my parents). I was curious to see who were these people who we so hated and who were fighting us, the Americans.
It turns out the Japanese enemy wasn't very visible. He was mostly sniping from tree tops and from under bushes or just from out of sight from the jungle. I heard that the Japanese soldiers in early WW II movies were actually Chinese -- probably because the Japanese Americans were still locked away in concentration camps. But the Japanese enemy who managed to actually appear and confront the Americans seemed to be especially mean and vicious, at least it seemed to me, compared our interactions with the Germans, though those special groups, the SS and the Gestapo also were really bad. And the way we talked about the enemy seemed to me different. While we hated the Krauts and the Nazis, the hatred seemed formulaic, while there was something especially venomous in how the Americans talked about the Japs. You can almost hear that same sneer in the movies when French Resistance fighters talk about the Bosch. Interestingly, the largest European ancestry population in the US is German. The Nazis and Gestapo were clearly subsets of the German people, whereas Japs were all Japanese. Thus in saying "the only good Jap is dead Jap", we were advocating genocide.
John Dower (in War Without Mercy), I think, pointed out that American soldiers saw the Japanese soldiers as something different, as he notes that an American soldier in the Pacific theater, in a friendly gesture, once sent Eleanor Roosevelt a letter opener made from the shin bone of a Japanese soldier -- a gift she politely declined. There apparently were many instances of such souvenirs being sent home to moms and girl friends.
So these things soaked into my childish brain somehow until one day I was playing war with my friends in our back yard. Amid the heat and fury of battle, I remember climbing onto the dog house and tossing a hand grenade inside, and yelling something like, "kill the Japs."
I remember then a silence filling the world. My parents, who until that time had been distractedly watching us play, gave each other a look. I don't remember them saying anything, to each other or to me. It was just a look caught out of the corner of my eye while I hung over the door of the dog house, and it somehow shut me down, embarrassed me, shamed me. I went on playing, I feel, in a dissociated unenthusiastic way, as if a bomb had gone off next to my head, deafening me, so I could only hear sounds in a muffled way. I remember this silence when some time later, when my father had been telling war stories with some of his friends, I asked him how many men he had killed.
In high school or maybe college, I once dated a local Japanese girl. At one point, I went to her home were she pointed to a framed full-page magazine ad by IBM. The ad's headline said something to the effect, "One of our sales representatives was captured by the Viet Cong", with some small print explaining the situation -- I think there actually was a mock Vietnamese village built somewhere in the US for someone's training purposes. The ad showed what appeared to be a Vietnamese farming village in bright sunlight, with several men in black with straw hats carrying AK-47s standing in the background, and in the foreground, a white man in the typical IBM uniform of white short-sleeve dress shirt and tie with pocket protector, horn rimmed glasses and slacks, carrying a brief case. My date seemingly proudly pointed to one of the "Viet Cong" in the picture and said, "That's my cousin." (Mixed emotions: glad that he could get work as a model in a national ad, but in the role of our country's current "enemy"?)
For me, there were two kinds of war movies, movies about the European theater and movies about the Pacific theater. Movies about the European theater, were to me, real war movies: they were about men fighting each other. In that sense, they were not that different from knights fighting each other, or cowboys fighting each other, cops and robbers.... But when it came to the Pacific theater, something was different. This is not simply because the Pacific war seems to have been fought primarily in jungles as opposed to the European towns, forests and fields, but because the enemy was Japanese, and I was Japanese (though born in America, as were my parents). I was curious to see who were these people who we so hated and who were fighting us, the Americans.
It turns out the Japanese enemy wasn't very visible. He was mostly sniping from tree tops and from under bushes or just from out of sight from the jungle. I heard that the Japanese soldiers in early WW II movies were actually Chinese -- probably because the Japanese Americans were still locked away in concentration camps. But the Japanese enemy who managed to actually appear and confront the Americans seemed to be especially mean and vicious, at least it seemed to me, compared our interactions with the Germans, though those special groups, the SS and the Gestapo also were really bad. And the way we talked about the enemy seemed to me different. While we hated the Krauts and the Nazis, the hatred seemed formulaic, while there was something especially venomous in how the Americans talked about the Japs. You can almost hear that same sneer in the movies when French Resistance fighters talk about the Bosch. Interestingly, the largest European ancestry population in the US is German. The Nazis and Gestapo were clearly subsets of the German people, whereas Japs were all Japanese. Thus in saying "the only good Jap is dead Jap", we were advocating genocide.
John Dower (in War Without Mercy), I think, pointed out that American soldiers saw the Japanese soldiers as something different, as he notes that an American soldier in the Pacific theater, in a friendly gesture, once sent Eleanor Roosevelt a letter opener made from the shin bone of a Japanese soldier -- a gift she politely declined. There apparently were many instances of such souvenirs being sent home to moms and girl friends.
So these things soaked into my childish brain somehow until one day I was playing war with my friends in our back yard. Amid the heat and fury of battle, I remember climbing onto the dog house and tossing a hand grenade inside, and yelling something like, "kill the Japs."
I remember then a silence filling the world. My parents, who until that time had been distractedly watching us play, gave each other a look. I don't remember them saying anything, to each other or to me. It was just a look caught out of the corner of my eye while I hung over the door of the dog house, and it somehow shut me down, embarrassed me, shamed me. I went on playing, I feel, in a dissociated unenthusiastic way, as if a bomb had gone off next to my head, deafening me, so I could only hear sounds in a muffled way. I remember this silence when some time later, when my father had been telling war stories with some of his friends, I asked him how many men he had killed.
In high school or maybe college, I once dated a local Japanese girl. At one point, I went to her home were she pointed to a framed full-page magazine ad by IBM. The ad's headline said something to the effect, "One of our sales representatives was captured by the Viet Cong", with some small print explaining the situation -- I think there actually was a mock Vietnamese village built somewhere in the US for someone's training purposes. The ad showed what appeared to be a Vietnamese farming village in bright sunlight, with several men in black with straw hats carrying AK-47s standing in the background, and in the foreground, a white man in the typical IBM uniform of white short-sleeve dress shirt and tie with pocket protector, horn rimmed glasses and slacks, carrying a brief case. My date seemingly proudly pointed to one of the "Viet Cong" in the picture and said, "That's my cousin." (Mixed emotions: glad that he could get work as a model in a national ad, but in the role of our country's current "enemy"?)
posted by Godel at 7:30 AM
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