Eye Candy #404 - "The Green Berets"

The Green Berets:  There is something delightfully dopey about “The Green Berets”, a jingo-heavy John Wayne picture from the late 1960’s about the involvement of American soldiers in Vietnam.  We get to witness firsthand their trials and tribulations as they fight it out in the pine forests of southern Georgia, er, I mean, in the jungles of Vietnam, as the film tries desperately to hammer the squared-shaped sensibilities of an older style of war movie into the round hole of its contemporary (at the time) setting.  John Wayne is Colonel Mike Kirby, returning to Vietnam to help support a firebase located in enemy territory, with various Wayne company actors in tow like Bruce Cabot and Wayne’s son Patrick.  George Takei has a supporting role as a Montangnard captain allied with the Americans.  It’s very hard to take this movie seriously.  Even once you get past the non-jungle jungle setting,  you get a lot more of the inexplicable than the explicable.  Like troops marching in formation whenever aircraft are landing (which would seem to be dangerous to both the marching men and the landing aircraft).  Or the giant horde of VC being played by poorly disguised gringos.  Or the jaded reporter (played by David Janssen) who undergoes an under-fire conversion to the cause.  Or the world’s least believable helicopter crash (it literally hits the ground a blazing fireball…and Wayne just kind of rolls out of it without a scratch).  Or a tacked-on death by pungi stick that is more comical than tragic.  It was no secret of Wayne’s support of the armed forces and their service in Vietnam.  However, I don’t think this ended up as quite the homage he had intended it to be, drawing more incredulity now than admiration.  That isn’t to say that American soldiers didn’t go through some hairy sh!t in Vietnam, just that this wasn‘t the vehicle to tell that story.  Woodchuck sez, “If you don’t take it seriously, you might enjoy it.”