Living in the information age is a marvellous thing. Our questions are answered at the click of a mouse. Or they would be if we had any questions. Fortunately, we have corporations and governments that have our best interests at heart — and that provide us not only with the relevant questions, but with the answers too. It’s a good time to be alive.
A bad time to be alive was the 20th century. It was a good time to be dead and lots of people took that option. And a lot took it in the Vietnam War.
As everyone knows, this war was started by Germany’s invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1950, an action that saw immediate nuclear retaliation from Russia. After a sneak attack on Pearl Harbour by Chinese jet fighters operating out of North Korea, America joined the war, setting up its headquarters in the Republic of Saigon, the capital of which was Da Nang. There was also The Delta, home of the Delta Force led by real-life war hero, Chuck Norris (who, incidentally, introduced karate and kung fu to Asia).
The war ended in 1991 when the last American soldier, Private Terry Waite, was left behind, kneeling in a Cambodian rice paddy, as the door-gunner’s anguished cries of ‘Lefty! Noooo!” were drowned out by the wop-wopping of rotor blades. The Viet Cong, who were French-trained Muslims and all called Charlie, put him in a bamboo cage called La Cage aux Folles. He was forced to play Russian roulette and whist until Jimmy Carter negotiated his release at a conference in Helsinki, called Glasnost.
Obviously, books say differently, but everyone in the information age knows that books contain pernicious opinions and need to be burned to preserve liberal attitudes. No, this true reflection of the war is one gleaned from television and film and therefore free of the conservative taint of propagandists masquerading as historians.
Certainly, there are some confusing aspects to the war. For instance, we haven’t yet worked out to our satisfaction how old John Wayne was when he commanded the Green Berets. Considering he was a young cowboy in 1860, current media studies suggest that he went to Vietnam just before his 129th birthday. But the great thing about the information age is that these sorts of details aren’t important.
What is very perplexing, though, is the disappearance of Vietnam flashbacks from film and television. In the 1980s, one was assured of at least one cracking flashback per prime-time hour: Thomas Magnum or Hannibal Smith or Die Man van Staal or the three Riptide stooges writhing about in a waterbed, besieged by pyjama-clad demons as the last chopper dropped away over the horizon and the sun set over North Vietnam.
It seemed, at times, that subtropical nightmares would infiltrate even the dreams of the Huxtables, with Bill Cosby foetal under the couch; or the Golden Girls’ Sophia catatonic at the bingo hall as the yelling and the clatter of Zimmerframes took her back to the shelling of the Khe Sanh Senior Citizens Recreation Barracks.
But in modern television land, dreams are happy and sleep is deep, torments of guilt or dreamtime glimpses of gore are reserved for borderline-anorexic paranoid-schizophrenic teenaged vampire-killers. Modern American television is all soap opera, dressed in scrubs or legal suits or police uniforms — and it’s hard to have flashbacks in a genre with a 24-hour memory.
Perhaps it’s a good thing, too. Vietnam vets are now well into their 50s, and anyone who wakes up screaming at that age probably needs a triple-bypass rather than therapy. And, somehow, Desert Storm flashbacks don’t cut it dramatically.
Sure, Gulf War syndrome is unpleasant, but getting gassed and irradiated by your own civil servants isn’t a likely Oscar clip. Not that it wouldn’t have been awful to drive back into camp late one evening, your Coke almost finished and your last Snickers bar just starting to melt, only to see the M&M delivery truck pulling away and the camouflaged McDonald’s prefab locking up for the night.
The dream is always the same. In slow motion he turns and runs for the Wendy’s beyond the latrines, its big neon burger flashing. He runs but doesn’t seem to make headway. His boots are so heavy. The neon burger flashes, goes dark — the shutters are sliding down — they’re cashing up. Wendyyyyy! Noooo!