We Were Soldiers

Latest, if by no means last, in the disgusting and apparently endless current avalanche of downright Nazi-style movies depicting the US military as saviours and protectors of the very planet they murder and plunder at will, We Were Soldiers cannot be watched without the immediate aid of a sick-bag.

If a film set in early-1940s Europe which illustrated the ‘heroism’ of the Wehrmacht, the Waffen-SS and the Einsatzkommandos was released right now, it would be howled out of existence by an outraged public. The difference is that We Were Soldiers – an allegedly ‘historical’ account of the US partition, annexation, rape and slaughter of Vietnam, presented in time-honoured ‘heroic warfare’ fashion – comes out in a climate where the annihilating power still reigns supreme and can dictate its own account of the facts.

Thus, a noxious enterprise dreamed up in some Hollywood studio, with Mel Gibson in the lead role, and a whole gale-force of post-September 11th sentiment in its obvious favour, comes to be inflicted on the rest of the planet. Gibson, reprising his Patriot role with more high-tech weaponry, plays Lt. Colonel Hal Moore, who ‘leads 400 young fathers, husbands, brothers and sons’, all troopers from an elite American combat division, into the ‘Valley of Death’, surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers.

Almost making up in gunshot volume and idiotic dialogue what it lacks in every other artistic virtue, We Were Soldiers truly is the triumph of the unspeakable. In the 1980s, nearly every US TV show and movie seemed to be questioning the purpose and morality of their Vietnam adventure: by 2002, severe historical amnesia has set in, and it seems that the US public have come to their senses and remembered that they were the good guys that time out, as they always are and always were.

As for the ‘plot’, it is such a despicable, selective, historically half-baked version of the highly engrossing history of wartime Vietnam that it doesn’t merit discussion. No more fucking war movies, pleeeease...