You got John Rambo coming in on this mission to rescue
these American POWs who are probably listed as MIA. There's no evidence at all
that there were any Americans still held after the war. None. My name is Bill Allison. I'm professor of history at
Georgia Southern University. I've been a battlefield
tour guide in Vietnam, and I've written several
books on the Vietnam War, including one on Mỹ Lai. Today we'll be looking at
some Vietnam War movies and judge how real they are. Spotted a large weapon down below. We're going to go down and check it out. All that's pretty accurate. The helicopters themselves
are the UH-1 Hueys, as well as the helicopter in the scene, the smaller helicopter, that's a Loach. So, Vietnam is quite rightly
known as the "Helicopter War." Helicopters were used
throughout the entire conflict. That's actually Filipino pilots. They borrowed those helicopters
from the Filipino Army to use for this scene. Now, you might wonder why
they're attacking this village. It's supposedly a VC
stronghold. VC, the Viet Cong. Why do they have to get it over
this village into the river? Why can't they just go up the coast? If you've not seen the film, there's a river patrol boat they need to get on the Nung River. Problem there is, the tidal
flow is not deep enough for the boat to actually
get across the sandbars, and that actually is
real. That's a problem. Playing "Valkyries" just kind
of blew your mind, right? Is that real? Probably less so. In at least one case
I know, Winston Groom, a veteran who did PSYOPs, he remembered flying around at night playing Vietnamese funeral music to try to freak out the VC. Was it effective? I would think not. And I think part of that is making an assumption
about the Vietnamese, that they're not as smart, that they would be
fallible to superstition and things like that. OK, there's napalm at work. Napalm is ubiquitous in the
Vietnam War. It's very common. It actually is derived from World War II. Give you a point of comparison. Probably about 30,000 tons
of napalm was used in Korea. Almost 400,000 tons of napalm
was dropped in Vietnam. So, it's highly flammable. It's kind of like a gelatinous substance. So if it gets on you and
burning, it sticks to you. You know, most people don't survive it, but it's designed to destroy cover, and if enemy are in there, then from your perspective
of using it, all the better. Which is pretty horrific.
It's a horrific weapon. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Napalm does smell. Obviously, with everything that's in it, it's going to have a very
gasoline-y, petroleum-like smell. So it has a very distinct
odor to it, for sure. Now, there's Robert
Duvall as Col. Kilgore, probably one of the most iconic characters in any Vietnam film. He is based on a guy, in part
by a guy, named John Stockton, who was the commander of the
unit that's depicted here, the 9th Cav of the 1st Cavalry Division. As far as it being a piece of
film, I'd give it a 10. Right? In reality, eh, you know, it's a little ludicrous
on a lot of levels. So I'm guessing probably about a five. The PAVN, also known as the NVA, the North Vietnamese Army, so it's the People's Army of Vietnam. The PAVN getting ready, I
think that's pretty accurate. What this scene is depicting is the January 1st, 1968, attack
on Fire Support Base Burt, which is near the Cambodian border. It's part of the 25th Infantry Division's area of operations. Oliver Stone, the director of "Platoon," was in the 25th Infantry Division and was involved in these engagements. And so that weapon they put
in, lodged in the tree there, it's in essence a marker
for the VC and PAVN guys to know where they're at. So if they have to go back, they'll see that marker in the tree. They'll have a waypoint. This is an outer defensive perimeter, and they've got trip wires
set up for flares to go out, and that tells you somebody's out there. There! OK, what Charlie Sheen just did there was fire the Claymores. So you've got these Claymore mines wired out along the perimeter, so when the enemy comes through, they're explosive and they
shoot out a bunch of shrapnel. It's a clicker. And so you try to bang
it so that it will fire. So, the bunkers that you see
Charlie Sheen in and others, if you had the time to
cut down a couple of trees and put some logs on top of you, that's a good defensive position to be in. Soldier: Aah! Aah! You had a command bunker,
which the guy runs into with the grenade, blows it up, right? I'm like, "Good luck with that." One, you gotta know where it's at. Two, you gotta be able to see it. It's dark except for the flashing of different
explosions and stuff, which means you're going to have trouble maintaining your night vision. So that probably more likely
could have been hit by mortars or something like that from the enemy. Dump everything you've got left on my pos. Helicopter pilot: We are
coming cocked for treetops. OK, this is a really desperate act. To call everything remaining,
everything up in the air, the problem with that is you're going to kill a
lot of your own guys. And how often that happened
in Vietnam? Very rarely. So, a fire support base is
actually, it's a small post, but it's very organized,
very well defended. What's depicted here is not that, and so the VC are hitting it before it's well defended. And the actual battle, I'm not sure that's
actually that realistic. If you watch the scene in its totality, you know, I'd have to give it a six maybe. As far as the actual real battle, I think it's a little overplayed. Tunnels were kind of
the go-to fortification, especially for the Viet Cong, but for the PAVN, that part, I don't know. I could see where they would have entrenched
bunkers probably, but to spend the time to
dig an entire complex, like was depicted in this scene, seems to me a bit of a stretch. VC would do that because the
VC usually are locally based, not moving around as much. They have an operating
area and they're going out. PAVN, they're moving around. So, this is where we're really infatuated
with the helicopter as a way to bring lots
of troops into an area that otherwise you can't really get to. And the idea is an element of surprise. Although a bunch of
helicopters coming at you isn't really surprising because you can hear
them from a long way off. So, this is depicting the November 1965 battle
of the Ia Drăng Valley. This is really the first
time where American forces face off against the People's
Army of Vietnam, the PAVN. Like, tête-à-tête. Right? This is part of Americanizing the war that the Johnson
administration; the Pentagon; MACV, Military Assistance
Command, Vietnam; determine that the ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, is not quite ready to fight on its own. This is a PAVN operation.
Those were clearly Viet Cong. They had the hat, you know, the conical hat, the black, right? OK, so the way the PAVN reacts, it seems like there's
just mass wave assault, and that's actually kind of accurate. The battle of Điện Biên Phủ
in 1954 against the French, Gen. Giáp just ordered wave after wave of these costly assaults. I mean, they won the battle,
they defeated the French, but at great cost. And Giáp was criticized for this. But this kind of stays in
the doctrine, if you will, for the PAVN, of, "This
is how you do things." And in this scene, part of the tactic is to get
as close to the Americans or to your enemy as possible. So if you can get close and hug your enemy as quick as possible, that
makes it much more difficult to call in the air strikes. But they're learning. This is early. We're talking 1965 here. So I don't think the PAVN
is fully appreciative of the capability of American air power, how quickly it can respond. Broken arrow! Broken arrow! At 150! OK, "broken arrow." For a lot of us, if we
heard "broken arrow," we would say, "Well, Hal
Moore lost a nuclear weapon? What's going on there?" Because that's what the code word is for, some incident with a nuclear weapon. "Broken arrow" may have been the code word for that particular operation if they were in danger of being overrun. What happens when you call "broken arrow," all air assets in the
area, whatever's up there, is supposed to converge on your position and drop on the coordinates that you give. And that's what happens here. And that's real, but it's not Hal Moore going,
"Broken arrow. Broken arrow." According to the book, it was the forward air controller. Minor inaccuracy. But Mel Gibson
has to be the hero, right? So, there's your napalm. And in one of these
attacks, it is true that the napalm was dropped so
close to Moore's perimeter that a couple of American
soldiers were actually burned in the napalm attack and killed. I know a lot of people
who really like this film because it's dramatic, and if they've read the book especially, but this attack, it just, it fails on a lot of levels, I think. I'd give it a five. Look out there, Sergeant.
Can you see them? They got rifles. Can you see the rifles? This is a bad situation. We've totally lost
command and control here. He didn't want them to fire,
but someone started firing. The lieutenant there, he's clearly lost it because he's seeing
things that aren't there. So he's seeing VC running around, and he can see their SKSs or AK-47s. Tom Cruise's character
is looking and going, "I don't really see that." You've got bad leadership at the top. A guy makes a bad assumption. Then you have lack of command and control, discipline over your own troops. This is not outside the
realm of possibility. Soldier: We didn't do this, did we? Oh, my God. Jesus Christ. This just shows how things can go wrong and a lot of civilians
get hurt and killed. So, if this village had
been a VC stronghold and there had been actual
Viet Cong in there, clearly identifiable and everything, no doubt they would've
fired into the village and then swept into the village. This is not so much like a
search-and-destroy mission, it's more of a sweep and clear. Search and destroy, which
is a pretty common tactic for the Americans in the Vietnam War, is basically go out,
try to find the enemy, make contact with the enemy, then call in firepower to destroy them. Literally kill them. But when you do things
like this in the scene and you kill a bunch of innocents, that sets you back a lot
with the local population. But there were instances where villages were attacked innocently. So, for example, the Mỹ Lai massacre, which occurred in March of 1968, when a company of American troops, as part of Task Force Barker, went into the Sơn Mỹ village complex, and specifically Mỹ Lai itself, expecting to find an entire
battalion of Viet Cong, and they get in there, and there's no 48th Local Force Battalion. It's not there. The villagers are there. But they're so amped up that they just, some immediately assume
that they're all VC. By the end of the day, between Mỹ Lai and a couple
of other places in that area, well over 500 men, women,
and children were killed. But Mỹ Lai is a rarity. It's an exception. I'd give it an eight. It shows just how a
couple of bad decisions or happenstance can cause a tragedy in war. And unfortunately, war is all
about tragedies happening. Rambo: Go on! Get moving! So, the setup here is you
got John Rambo coming in on this mission to rescue
these American POWs who are probably listed as MIA. The war's over and there's
still Americans being held by the nasty Vietnamese, right? There's no evidence at all
that there were any Americans still held after the war. None. But after the war, there became a cottage industry in Vietnam and especially in Thailand
of selling false information to families who had
people listed as missing. And all those missing names are listed in The New York Times. They know who they are. They
know the units and everything. They can create fake dog tags and rust them up and everything. And you'll pay, you know,
$10,000 to somebody in Bangkok who has this information
on your loved one, right? In the hope of. Ross Perot got hung up in this, trying to rescue people again. Chuck Norris made six
films about going back and rescuing these people. We get our history from movies. So we all come to believe
that this is the case, right? It's a tragic deal all
the way around, I think. When this film comes out, you
know, height of the Cold War, you gotta have the
Russians in there, right? Now, would a Russian have
been out there at this prison? Probably not. Thousands
of Russian and Chinese technical advisors, military
advisors were in North Vietnam throughout the whole conflict. A lot of them were there
to train, for example, North Vietnamese antiaircraft crews to operate these Soviet and Chinese fairly sophisticated antiaircraft weapons. But they also have operational
and strategic advisors. So that's not uncommon at all. I gotta like a guy who's muscled like that and can operate an M60 with impunity and kill pretty much everyone around him. But as far as reality goes, zilch. Gotta give it a zero. OK, let's set up this scene. This is from "The Green Berets," and it was filmed in '66,
'67, released in June of 1968. So this is after the Tết Offensive, after the New Hampshire primary, after Martin Luther
King's been assassinated, Johnson's announced he's
not going to run again. This is not the best time to release a go, rah, Vietnam film. This is based on Robin Moore's novel called "The Green Berets." In this particular scene, this Green Beret team is going to kidnap this PAVN colonel or general, but as far as units working together, like with the Green
Berets, you know, maybe. 1965, '66, '67, there's probably more the
Americans working on their own. There would always be an ARVN
liaison with bigger units, like probably at the
battalion or regimental level. Certainly at the division level. The game must have been engrossing, because they don't hear anybody else. You've got six or seven guys
coming through with combat gear and combat boots on, on a
pier-and-beam wood floor that apparently doesn't squeak,
and they're none the wiser. It's just totally ludicrous. And now we have to do
this in dramatic fashion and we have to rappel
off the second story. Because apparently the
guys playing mah-jongg still are not alerted
that something's going on. Ah, everything goes according to plan. So, the trip wire, is that a common thing
for special forces to do? I'd say no, because you want
to be able to get out of there and get away quickly if
you're on some sort of mission anywhere close to like this one. But even then, do you have time to do it? That's more of a thing you
set for a defensive position. Can I have a rating of: Should never have been
filmed in the first place? Zero. Totally. And I hate to do that because part of me likes
some John Wayne films. But this one, ah, no. This scene is depicting
the battle for Huế city, which is part of the great
Tết Offensive in January 1968. What you just saw with
the tank going forward, the Marines going behind the tank, yeah, that's good policy. But then you see all the firing.
So it's been pre-sighted. But what's funny to me is
then the Marines get up and immediately go into that area where they just pre-sighted,
pre-ranged fire. So if I was the bad guy, the enemy, I would've fired again while the Marines were all right there. But they don't do that. Now, to be clear, this looks
nothing like Huế city at all. Huế city, there's no
tall buildings like that. It's very dense buildings. There's not a lot of maneuver room. But here it looks really open. In part this is because they
filmed this outside of London at Beckton Gas Works. The one thing they do get right, because it's outside of
London, it's overcast. So during the battle for Huế, it was overcast for most of the time, which made it difficult
to get air support in. Now, if you notice at
the very beginning there, when the firing starts to
come from the building, it's not a single sniper, it's several machine guns set up there. A sniper would've fired a couple shots and got the heck out of there. These guys are in place, so
it's hard for them to move. So that's why the Marines respond with just blasting the area
with fire, trying to hit them. All right, so there he
is taking a picture. It was not uncommon for soldiers to have nice cameras. Because they get R&R sometimes. They can go to Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, I should say, now. If they're officers,
they can go to Hong Kong or someplace like that, and you could buy really nice
cameras for not very much. And this would've been a PAVN sniper. The PAVN snipers are going
to go after specific targets. VC snipers tended to use the tactic just to cause chaos and fear. So you randomly hit somebody. You see a guy on a radio
headset, talking on the radio, that's probably an officer. You're an easy target. The visual part of it, the setting of it is, to me, all wrong. Other than the overcast
skies, that is realistic. I don't know. I'd give it probably a six. I don't think he needs binoculars to see that the enemy is
approaching, but it's a good touch. The scene is really about the 1972 attack on Quảng Trị. So the PAVN have occupied
Quảng Trị city and the citadel, and the ARVN are trying to take it back. And the ARVN, of course, they've
got all the American stuff. So their uniforms were
American style. That's spot-on. So, you gotta remember, this is 1972, following the Easter Offensive. So by that stage, even though the United States is technically still in the war, we're not doing a lot of
combat activity at that point. Most of our troops are
out of Vietnam by then. Equipment's good. They've got AK-47s, some RPGs there. So, the PAVN unit that's depicted here is a basic infantry unit. Yes, by this time in
'72, they've got tanks. They're a conventional force. The only thing they don't
really have a lot of is air. You did see initially the forward artillery guy calling in the artillery strikes,
which didn't do anything, but there's no depiction of him asking for an adjustment of fire to hit, which, I think in reality there would've been a fire adjustment and they would've kept
firing on those APCs until they got really close
to the PAVN perimeter there. So that part of it I
think is not accurate. I like this movie. Its production value is not great, but the storyline and
the period it's set in and the way they depict
soldiers and everything, I like it. And this battle scene, even though the ARVN guys are
out there exposed and whatnot, I gotta give it a six or seven, actually. I kind of like this one. So, I have two favorite Vietnam films. One is from the early '70s,
called "Go Tell the Spartans." And it's early in the war, it's in the advisory phase, and it's kind of foreshadowing the problems that are going to arise. The other one I like a lot is actually "Good Morning, Vietnam." Hey, thanks so much for
watching. I enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to watch some
more, click on the next video.
