Hollywood and the Culture of War

Having come of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I still find myself having many of those famous Second Thoughts popularized by David Horowitz (though I arrived at a different destination). To many of my generation, this reconsideration is seen as anything from unnecessary to bewildering. Most of the American public seems to share this attitude, hence it's no wonder that the effects of bad foreign and economic policy continue.

Congressman Charles Rangel (D, NY) recently proposed resurrecting the military draft. It's a silly idea, but it reveals the current level of desperation among pacifists to stop the fanatical war cabal in the White House. In 1968 I registered for the draft and waited for my birth date (August 31, 1950) to be drawn for selection. August 31 drew number 11, and if it were not for my 1-Y deferment (i.e., losing the use of my left arm to polio), I would have been on my way to Southeast Asia. Many of my friends were "lucky" enough to be selected, but I truly wanted to go. As the horrors and futility of Vietnam now become more obvious with every passing year, what was it that played a large part in convincing me that I wanted to go?

War and the Rise of Television

In the 1950s, World War II was still fresh in the public mind and television was becoming an increasingly prominent part of everyday life. TV programming in the 1950s was filled with Westerns and war movies balanced with the occasional horror film at the local drive in. Westerns always had good guys prevailing over bad guys by way of the gun. The adventures of Wyatt Earp (Wyatt Earp), Johnny Uma (The Rebel), Paladin (Have Gun Will Travel), Maverick (Maverick), Cheyenne (Cheyenne), and Marshall Dillon (Gunsmoke) made the Western king. Virtually all Westerns centered on bad guys committing a crime followed by good guys killing the bad guys for their crime. This injected an atmosphere of self-righteous vigilantism into the culture. Americans were inherently good people, could readily discern good from evil, and therefore not only had the right to march around their communities and cities like Robert Conrad with their chests puffed out, but also march around the Western hemisphere or world and "put the hurt" on people of whom they didn't approve.

During this time more literal enactments of war were of course found in such conspicuous weekly TV dramas as 12 O’clock High and Combat. 12 O'clock was about the adventures of a squadron of B-17s. Combat documented the activities of a squad of American GIs in the European theatre. When conducting their assigned patrol and encountering German troops or winning over a German position, the small squad numbering 4–6 soldiers always implausibly survived the fierce fire fight while numerous German soldiers were always killed. This military implausibility of Americans winning just because they were good ol' Americans preceded the inane Rambo series by decades. One can only wonder how the rest of the world has marveled at our cultural arrogance as these movies and TV shows are replayed overseas. One wonders what their appeal could be to the rest of the world. My hunch is that some clever impresario has reclassified them as comedies.

Military comedies continued the cultural dishonesty. Hogan’s Heroes and McHale’s Navy seldom (if ever at all) showed hand-to-hand combat and limited the human carnage and destruction of war to safely distant explosions of bombs. The main characters were always heroes and rarely did we see crew members suffer loss of life or limb or kill fellow soldiers in agonizing incidents of friendly fire. In the interest of added realism, some programs did allow some death. These "kill off" roles lasted for usually no more than a few episodes. (It was truly a pity for any acting career to get typecast into these roles.)

Movies could have been better at portraying the horror of war but were only used to create a reason for a soldier to become a hero (e.g., to gladly storm a position to become machine gun fodder). If killed, the soldier’s sacrifice was always (unconvincingly) portrayed as leading to some significant advance of Allied troops or the winning of a key battle. The movie To Hell and Back (1955) was released as a dramatized autobiography of the heroic achievements of Audie Murphy during the Second World War. Awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, Audie was depicted as willing to risk himself to save a position, a comrade, or the fate of a battle. Much overlooked was the distinct possibility that there could have been some not-so-admirable reasons for Audie's behavior. It's been said that Audie’s attraction to heroic exploits was rooted in a psychological need to "measure up" in terms of proving his manhood. His small stature caused him to think that to be considered equal to other soldiers, he had to be braver than they were, even to the point of recklessness.

In Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), John Wayne portrayed hardened Marine sergeant John Stryker whose job was to eliminate individualism by training recruits to "…move like one man and think like one man." The film audience learns that good soldiers train harder than the enemy and do what they are told. The actor John Agar played Conway, a cultured son of a military hero who had an attitude of indifference ("I’m a civilian, not a Marine. I’m strictly here for tradition."). Conway bucked against Stryker and his tactics at every move. However, while daydreaming about his new bride Conway is saved from injury from a grenade explosion by Stryker and over time the anti-marine becomes Supermarine. So much so, in fact, that near the end of the film with Stryker lying dead it is (surprise!) no one other than Conway who effortlessly steps into Stryker's shoes telling the other squad members, "Alright, saddle up. Let’s get back in the war!" Sands, if anything, was excellent in selling the "adventure of war" to an entire generation of innocent and impressionable young kids. The Marine branch of the armed services viewed Sands as one of its best recruiting films ever.

Children of the Baby Boom such as Ron Kovic grew up on a steady diet of these war glorification films, and this primed them to be gun and bomb fodder in Vietnam. Unfortunately for Mr. Kovic and many men like him, by the time they learned the ugly real truth about war it was too late. In retrospect, blind support for war was an objective Hollywood's producers and directors accomplished with great success. It's too bad many of them weren't sent to the front lines instead.

The small, blue-collar Midwest country town I was raised in was a place where the VFW was dotingly honored and military service was unquestioningly revered. In my teens the late 1960s presented me with the Cold War, a time with which the current generation of young people is increasingly unfamiliar. More so than today's background fear of terrorism was the daily confrontation between the nuclear superpowers. Television was a useful tool to drum a steady fear into the consciousness of America about communism and Soviet expansion. Every move and countermove between the superpowers was sensationalized nightly through the reporting of Walter Cronkite. Nikita Khrushchev, then leader of the USSR, was on television pounding his shoe on a podium telling the American public, "We will bury you!"

Television thus played a role in centralizing the government's power. Fear spread to small, local communities. In junior high school a course on nuclear war and survival was offered. The feeling was pervasive that nuclear destruction was imminent, so I eagerly took the course and learned the proper way to build a fallout shelter, how long to remain in it once the war started, what to stock it with, and where to find fresh water and edible food during the first year or two after a nuclear attack. The irony is that it was well known to the defense establishment that these shelters would have been easily destroyed and hence useless in any large-scale attack. Unless they had thick lead walls, they would have done little to protect the occupants against dangerous gamma radiation. Yet the defense establishment let the public engage in a ubiquitous survival-planning charade for decades. "Duck and cover" bombing drills were carried out with the same regularity as fire or storm drills, the latter protecting children against much more plausible and survivable threats. Civil Defense groups organized, provided guides for building and stocking fallout shelters, and served as general organs propagating the Cold War culture.

Most people of my generation have quickly forgotten the fear, paranoia, and propaganda of this era through which we as young Americans endured. Only in retrospect is it amazing that so many of us so unquestioningly went along with it. We "knew" that war with the USSR would lead to our annihilation and deterrence through a strong nuclear arsenal was the only solution. It was known as MAD, mutually assured destruction, and a mad season it was. Laughably, the cultural agitprop insisted that the opportunity to be a traditional military hero was still alive. Hero status was now said to be attainable through snitch behavior designed to stop the Terrible Threat of Communism. Views of communism like those of Murray Rothbard – that the Soviet menace, based as it was on an incorrigibly flawed economy, was overblown – were seen as anything from unpatriotic to loony. As time goes on, Rothbard seems to be vindicated more and more. Nevertheless, the government used events in Cuba to persuade us that the menace was very real: communism and hostile missiles within 100 miles of a major US city. They were "coming to get us" any day.

The litmus test of my generation's patriotism was Vietnam. Some of my friends were drafted, others volunteered and went off to combat. I received letters from one friend complaining not about the validity of the war or the atrocities being committed by the likes of John Kerry, but about not receiving letters from girls. Not getting letters from girls! Imagine that. Here was someone who bought into the nonsense that women were going to fawn all over him now that he was in the Army. After all, they fawned all over John Wayne because he played soldier on the Big Screen. Why wouldn't they fawn even more over the real McCoy?

Gil Stevens Wilfong (1950–1969)

The letters I most eagerly awaited were from my friend Gil. We grew up together attending the same schools and church and becoming good friends. He was a wonderful hunting, fishing, and camping companion. In one of his letters sent to me from Nam, he revealed his desire to be a helicopter door gunner. The Gil I knew could make it through anything, but this concerned me. Helicopter door gunner was one of the most perilous positions in the war. The only appeal it had to young, impressionable guys like Gil was the glory of braving extreme danger to protect comrades and "kill gooks." Gil swore me to strict confidence about his desire for this dangerous position, imploring me not to tell his parents. I tried to dissuade him, but my efforts were in vain. As I reflect on it now, his impetuous desire to put himself in harm's way was exactly what the fictional Stryker, Conway, and Thomas would have done. It is what I tried to do but was prevented.

While my deferment kept me home, I counted the days until Gil's return. I looked forward to us returning to afternoons of fishing at the lake, nights sitting around the campfire joking, telling stories, and lying about girls. I missed our trips rabbit hunting in the winter and our debates about which brands of shotguns was the best.

I'll never forget the beautiful Sunday morning I walked to church and heard the last thing I'd ever hear about Gil. As I approached the small building, an ominous dark-colored car almost silently floated by me on the narrow, gravel road on which I was walking. Like the Devil's hearse, the car came to a quiet halt in the small white gravel church parking lot. Two men in crisp officer uniforms got out of the vehicle and stiffly walked toward the building with grave expressions on their faces. I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. As our paths toward the church sanctuary door converged, their eyes met mine. I asked them if they needed any help. One of them asked for directions to the church office. I accompanied them to the office feeling sicker with every step. As I turned to walk away from the office I overheard their request to see Mr. and Mrs. Wilfong, an indescribable feeling of loss overcame me. All the beautiful aspects of nature on that resplendent country morning suddenly seemed tenuous, fleeting, and futile.

Late that afternoon, under a swollen and fading orange sun, I entered Gil's home to offer my condolences to his parents. The living room of their small home was crowded but subdued and somber. Immediately his mother saw me and quietly approached. "Oh Rodney… we lost him," she gasped, tears streaming down her face. Gil's father sat next to her in catatonic despair, not even able to raise his eyes from the floor, never mind face anyone in the room.

As I returned home in the late-summer twilight along that quiet road Gil and I had so often traveled, it finally sunk in that he was gone forever. Gone forever were our future night visits to the local drive in, future afternoons watching baseball games, and our plans to live and raise families near each other. The only thing left to fill his lively presence was a deafening emptiness.

Send in the Clowns

It's a paradox that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Stryker and the rest of Hollywood's band of fictional war heroes from yesteryear were just as deceptive as today's bloodthirsty neoconservatives. War for world domination doesn't create heroes or winners, just empty spaces where warm friends, dear family members, and fond memories once stood. The Northeastern neocon elite doesn’t care about this because their sons and daughters won't be the ones killing and dying on the front lines of Dubya's war. In light of this, a revision of Charlie Rangel's recent proposal just might be the answer: draft the neocons.

January 28, 2003

Rod Oglesby, PhD, CPA [send him mail], teaches accounting in Missouri. He is treasurer of the Polk County Libertarian Party and the newest contributor to AgainstTheCrowd.com.

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