[Peace-discuss] full metal phantom

[E. Wayne Johnson]

I downloaded and watched Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket the other day.  Not 
a movie one watches
with the family unless you want Alice and Ellie pacing the hallways 
singing salty Duckworth chants
about estimations of Inuit molecular energies but a great movie nonetheless.

I had seen the movie before back in the 80's and found resonance with 
the anti-war message
but hadn't thought about it much beyond that.  The internet provides 
access to a lot of info.

I found out that the movie was based on a book "The Short-Timers" by 
Gustav Hasford.
I find out that Gus is dead but one of his relatives maintains a website 
about him and
his stuff, like the original script for Full Metal Jacket and other 
triviabilia.
Hasford's books are out of print, but they are all available online at 
his website.

http://www.gustavhasford.com/home.htm

"The Phantom Blooper" is a sequel to "The Short Timers" and has some 
very interesting
quotations and insights.  Hasford thought that his books would become 
popular
after the success of the movie, and he could use the books as a platform 
for
dissemination of his ideas, but that popularity never materialized.  
"The Phantom
Blooper" is laced with pithy quotables.

http://www.gustavhasford.com/phantom.html

*"/Chien Si My/, why do your armymen go ten thousand miles from home to 
live a helluva life and to die on this land?  This country is not 
yours.  We do no harm to your homeland.  Why have you come here to kill 
our men and women and destroy our homeland?"*
*    I don't know what to say.*
*    The printer continues:  "You cannot defeat us.  You do not even 
know who we are.  You cannot even see us.  Your country lives inside a 
dream and tries to kill anything outside of the dream, but we live in 
the real world, so you cannot kill us.  We have fought for twenty years 
and we will fight on until weare victorious, until we have freedom. Just 
as your forefathers did two hundred years ago.  Uncle Ho began the 
Vietnamese Declaration of Independence by quoting the American 
Declaration of Independence:  'All men are created equal, that they are 
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among 
these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'  American armymen 
no longer fight to protect their liberty but to steal ours. /Chien Si 
My,/ how did your great and heroic country lose its greatness and allow 
itself to be taken over by gangsters?"*

*
Hasford also wrote a letter to the LA Times on the 5th anniversary of 
the Vietnam War- here is an excerpt:

*...Hawks hate the Vietnam veterans for being a candy-ass who couldn't 
get the job done; those World War II boys won their war and didn't whine 
about how tough it was, either.  Doves hate the Vietnam veteran because, 
in their view, each and every one routinely slaughtered helpless 
civilians, especially babies.*
*    America's breast is a milkless stone, and she demands heroes from 
her sons.  A recent Harris poll shows that 63% of the American people 
feel that Vietnam veterans "were made suckers, having to risk their 
lives in the wrong place at the wrong time."  Vietnam veterans probably 
will in fact go down in history as "suckers," but we fall from glory 
alongside the nation that bred us, because a country that degrades, 
stigmatizes and humiliates its young for committing the heinous crime of 
steadfast loyalty can no longer be trusted or taken seriously by 
anyone.  Even animals protect their young.*
*    What have I learned about Vietnam from the federal government?  I 
have learned, for one thing, that politics is a ballet of devils, and 
that politicians, with paper roses falling out of their mouths, cannot 
conceal the blood from distant wounds that stains their neckties--but 
they do try, and millions do listen and believe, and choose not to see.*
*    Vietnam, in my opinion, never ended.  Peace is only a continuation 
of hypocrisy by other means, just as Watergate, for example, was a 
continuation of Vietnam by other means.*
*    Now, five years after the last American soldier left the soil of 
Vietnam, the sum of our added knowledge is small.  Smug in our apathy, 
few of us would take time to admit that today's problems might in some 
way be related to the war in Vietnam.*
*    Our refusal to face our Vietnam experience honestly has meant that 
the national nightmare of Vietnam continues to poison this country's 
sense of itself, and that refusal postpones the needed reckoning with 
our own dark history as well.*
*    Today, I talk to the 19-year-old children who will soon be dead in 
the Oil Wars (to them Vietnam is some kind of Chinese breakfast food), 
and their face-value acceptance of what the government has defined as 
their patriotic duty puts a cold chord of fear and helplessness into my 
gut that is not unlike Daniel Ellsberg's response to the death of Robert 
Kennedy--total impotence in the face of unbridled ruthlessness.*
*    Recently I have been investigating the possibilities of living in 
Australia.  Perhaps someday the survivors of America will come back and 
will build log cabins in the streets.  At least, as Hemingway said, it's 
pretty to think so.*
*    Meanwhile, I ask you to join me in celebrating the fifth 
anniversary of the final withdrawal of the United States from Southeast 
Asia with a degree of pageantry and excitement comparable to that we all 
enjoyed during Vietnam Veterans' Week--by popping open a cold can of 
beer and raising a toast:  "Here's to the good old days, when we knew 
who our enemies were and were sanctioned by society to deal with them 
accordingly.  Here's to the good old days."*
*    Goodbye, America.  And goodbye to Vietnam and the friends who died 
for nothing.*
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