(4) What is Vietnam doing in The Birdcatcher?
The Birdcatcher is a story about the second half of the twentieth
century, and no story can adequately deal with that without
including Vietnam. As Christopher Stone says late in the book,
something important happened there.
I should mention that, although I am a Canadian and I was a young
man during the Vietnam War, and though 12,000 Canadians served
in the U.S. forces there, I wasn't one of them. As I said in the
foreword to The Birdcatcher, I considered myself unqualified to
send Chris Stone to Vietnam, but he insisted on going.
Statistically the Vietnam War doesn't measure up to conflicts like
the Second World War. For example, in February 1969, during one
week of the Tet offensive, 561 American soldiers were killed in
Vietnam, the worst week for U.S. casualties in that war. That's a lot
more than Americans have seen yet in Iraq or Afghanistan, but
compare it with the 1945 American assault on the island of Iwo Jima
– there, in the first week alone, almost 7,000 Americans died - or the
D-Day landing in 1944, when 10,000 allied soldiers died in the first
few hours – or Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where over 200,000
Japanese died, most of them in a few minutes.
Yet Vietnam haunts the modern world in ways that the two world
wars have never done. Some say it's because Vietnam was the first
'TV war'. But World War II produced many movies, especially during
the war, and people followed the newspapers closely. Hemingway
and other popular writers had a field day from the D-Day landing on.
But what WWII film has retained the interest or acquired the fame of
Apocalypse Now?
Yes, Vietnam was a different war. Those who came home after
fighting in the two world wars were treated as heroes, in the way
soldiers have been treated throughout the ages. But Vietnam
veterans returned home to the most ambiguous reception soldiers
have ever received. What does it tell you that the only people in the
world who liked them, who still welcome them back with smiles and
warmth when they return to Vietnam today, were, and are, the
South Vietnamese?
Why do I think that war remains so strongly in our collective
psyche?
It was fought in one of the world's most beautiful places, for the
hearts and minds of one of the world's most beautiful peoples.
Apocalypse Now retains its power over thirty years later because
Coppola found a way to demonstrate not only the beauty of the
people and the land, but the dark mythic beauty of the war itself.
We don't think of wartime Europe as beautiful do we? The images
that stay with us are the emaciated bodies of concentration camp
survivors and the rubble of cities. We picture World War I as the
slaughter of men in a muddy wasteland.
War destroyed Europe's beauty, temporarily, but it couldn't do that
to Vietnam. That's why Vietnam has such a hold on us. I think it's
meaning is somehow tied up with that.
Yes, in The Birdcatcher, Chris Stone says that he's convinced that
something happened in Vietnam that was important to all the world,
not just to the participants. Historians may never be able to explain
it for us, but I'm convinced that the Vietnam War will go on rever-
berating through human consciousness for a long time, maybe as
long as the Trojan war, a war fought thousands of years ago for the
sake of a beautiful woman.
Alan Conrad