Vietnam War Historian Breaks Down 8 Vietnam War Scenes In Movies And TV | How Real Is It? | Insider

You have John Rambo on this mission to rescue these American prisoners of war who are probably listed as missing in action. There is no evidence that Americans were still detained after the war. None. My name is Bill Allison. I am a history professor at Georgia Southern University. I have been a battlefield tour guide in Vietnam and have written several books about the Vietnam War, including one about Mỹ Lai. Today we will look at some Vietnam War

movies

and judge how

real

they are. I saw a big gun below. Let's go down and check it out. That's all pretty accurate.

The helicopters themselves are UH-1 Hueys, as well as the helicopter in the scene, the smaller helicopter, which is a Loach. That's why Vietnam is rightly known as the "Helicopter War." Helicopters were used throughout the conflict. They are actually Filipino pilots. They borrowed those helicopters from the Philippine Army to use in this scene. Now you might be wondering why they are attacking this village. It is supposedly a VC stronghold. VC, the Viet Cong. Why do they have to pass through this town to the river? Why can't they just go down the coast? If you haven't seen the movie, there is a river patrol boat they need to get to the Nung River.

The problem is that the tide is not deep enough for the boat to cross the sandbars, and that is

real

. That is a problem. Playing "Valkyries" blew your mind, right? Is that real? Probably less. In at least one case I know of, Winston Groom, a veteran who performed PSYOP, recalled flying around at night playing Vietnamese funeral music to try to scare the VC. Was it effective? I do not think so. And I think part of that is assuming that Vietnamese people aren't that smart, that they would be fallible to superstition and things like that. Okay, there's napalm in action.

Napalm is omnipresent in the Vietnam War. It's very common. It actually stems from World War II. Give you a point of comparison. About 30,000 tons of napalm were probably used in Korea. Almost 400,000 tons of napalm were dropped in Vietnam. So, it is highly flammable. It is something like a gelatinous substance. So if it falls on you and burns you, it sticks to you. You know, most people don't survive, but it's designed to destroy cover, and if the enemy is there, then from your perspective of using it, all the better. Which is pretty horrible. It's a horrible weapon.

I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Napalm smells. Obviously, with everything it contains, it will have a very petroleum-like smell. So it sure has a very distinctive smell. Now there's Robert Duvall as Colonel Kilgore, probably one of the most iconic characters in any Vietnam film. He is based on a guy, partly on a guy, named John Stockton, who was the commander of the unit shown here, the 9th Cavalry of the 1st Cavalry Division. As for it being a piece of film, I would give it a 10. No? Actually, uh, you know, it's a little ridiculous on a lot of levels.

So I guess probably around a five. The PAVN, also known as the NVA, the North Vietnamese Army, is the People's Army of Vietnam. The PAVN is preparing, I think that's pretty accurate. What this scene represents is the January 1, 1968 attack on Burt Fire Support Base, which is near the Cambodian border. It is part of the 25th Infantry Division's area of ​​operations. Oliver Stone, the director of "Platoon," was in the 25th Infantry Division and participated in these engagements. And that gun they put up, lodged in the tree over there, is essentially a marker so the VC and PAVN guys know where they are.

So if they have to go back, they will see that marker in the tree. They will have a reference point. This is an outer defensive perimeter, and they have tripwires set up so that flares go off, and that tells you that someone is out there. There! Well, what Charlie Sheen just did was fire the Claymores. Then you have these Claymore mines wired along the perimeter, so when the enemy passes by, they are explosive and shoot a bunch of shrapnel. It's a clicker. Then you try to hit it to make it shoot. So the bunkers that you see Charlie Sheen and others in, if you had time to cut down a couple of trees and put some logs on top, that's a good defensive position to be in.

Soldier: Aah! Ah! You had a command bunker, where the guy runs into the grenade and blows it up, right? I say, "Good luck with that." First, you must know where he is. Two, you have to be able to see it. It's dark except for the flash of different explosions and stuff, which means you'll have trouble maintaining your night vision. So probably most likely it was hit by mortars or something from the enemy. Throw everything you have left at my position. Helicopter pilot: We arrived cocked toward the treetops. Well, this is a really desperate act. To call everything that's left, everything that's up in the air, the problem with that is you're going to kill a lot of your own guys.

And how often did that happen in Vietnam? Very rarely. So a fire support base is actually a small post, but it is very organized and very well defended. What is shown here is not that, so the VC is attacking it before it is well defended. And the actual battle, I'm not sure it's that realistic. If you look at the scene as a whole, you know, maybe I'd have to give it a six. As for the actual battle, I think it's a bit overdone. The tunnels were a preferred type of fortification, especially for the Viet Cong, but for the PAVN, that part, I don't know.

I could see where they probably would have dug in bunkers, but spending time digging up an entire complex, as shown in this scene, seems a bit over the top to me. VC would do that because VCs are generally based locally and don't move around as much. They have an area of ​​operations and they are leaving. PAVN, they are moving. So this is where we're really obsessed with the helicopter as a way to get a lot of troops into an area that couldn't otherwise be reached. And the idea is an element of surprise. Although it's not surprising that a lot of helicopters are coming towards you because you can hear them from very far away.

So this represents the November 1965 battle in the Ia Drăng Valley. This is actually the first time that US forces have faced the People's Army of Vietnam, the PAVN. Like, tête-à-tête. Good? This is part of the Johnson administration's Americanization of the war; the Pentagon; MACV, Military Assistance Command, Vietnam; determine that the ARVN, the army of the Republic of Vietnam, is not prepared to fight alone. This is a PAVN operation. They were clearly Viet Cong. They had the hat, you know, the conical hat, the black one, right? Okay, so from the way the PAVN reacts, it looks like there's just a massive surge attack, and that's actually pretty accurate.

At the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954 against the French, General Giáp simply 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 it. But this remains the doctrine, so to speak, for the PAVN, of "This is how things are done." And in this scene, part of the tactic is to get as close to the Americans or the enemy as possible. So if you can get in close and hug your enemy as quickly as possible, it will be much harder to call in airstrikes.

But they are learning. This is early. We're talking about 1965 here. So I don't think the PAVN fully appreciates the capabilities of American airpower and how quickly it can respond. Broken Arrow! Broken Arrow! At 150! Okay, "broken arrow." Many of us, if we heard "broken arrow," would say, "Well, did Hal Moore lose a nuke? What's going on there?" Because that's what the keyword 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 is up there, are supposed to converge on your position and land on the coordinates you provide.

And that's what happens here. And that's real, but it's not Hal Moore saying, "Broken arrow. Broken arrow." According to the book, he 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 napalm was dropped so close to the Moore perimeter that a couple of American soldiers were burned in the napalm attack and died. I know a lot of people who really like this movie because it's dramatic, and if they've read the book especially, but this attack just fails on so many levels I think.

I would give it a five. Be careful, sergeant. You can see them? They have rifles. Can you see the rifles? This is a bad situation. We have totally lost command and control here. I didn't want them to shoot, but someone started shooting. The lieutenant there is clearly lost because he is seeing things that don't exist. He then sees VC running and can see his SKS or AK-47. Tom Cruise's character looks and says, "I don't really see that." You have bad leadership at the top. A boy makes a bad assumption. Then you have a lack of command and control, of discipline over your own troops.

This is not outside the realm of possibility. Soldier: We didn't do this, did we? Oh Lord. Jesus Christ. This just shows how things can go wrong and many civilians are injured and killed. So if this village had been a VC stronghold and there had been a real Viet Cong there, clearly identifiable and everything, they would no doubt have fired on the village and then razed the village to the ground. This isn't so much like a search and destroy mission, it's more broad and clear. Search and destroy, which is a fairly common tactic for Americans in the Vietnam War, is basically going out, trying to find the enemy, making contact with them, and then calling in firepower to destroy them.

Literally kill them. But when you do things like this in the scene and kill a bunch of innocents, that sets you back a lot with the local population. But there were cases when villages were attacked innocently. Thus, for example, the Mỹ Lai massacre, which occurred in March 1968, when a company of American troops, as part of Task Force Barker, entered the Sơn Mỹ village complex, and specifically Mỹ Lai itself , expecting to find a whole massacre. Viet Cong battalion, and they go in there, and there is no 48th Local Force Battalion. It's not there. The villagers are there.

But they are so enthusiastic that some immediately assume they are all VCs. By the end of the day, between Mỹ Lai and a couple of other places in that area, more than 500 men, women and children were killed. But Mỹ Lai is a rarity. It is an exception. I would give it an eight. It shows how a couple of bad decisions or coincidences can cause a tragedy in war. And unfortunately, war is about tragedies that happen. Rambo: Go ahead! Move! So the setup here is that John Rambo comes on this mission to rescue these American prisoners of war who are probably listed as missing.

The war is over and there are still Americans being held by the nasty Vietnamese, right? There is no evidence that Americans were still detained after the war. None. But after the war, it became a cottage industry in Vietnam and especially Thailand of selling false information to families who had people listed as missing. And all those missing names appear 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 and everything. And you'll pay, you know, $10,000 to someone in Bangkok who has this information about your loved one, right?

Hoping for. Ross Perot got caught up in this, trying to rescue people again. Chuck Norris made six

movies

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? I think it's a tragic deal in every way. When this movie comes out, you know, at the height of the Cold War, you have to have the Russians there, right? Now, would a Russian have been in this prison? Probably not. Thousands of Russian and Chinese military and technical advisors were in North Vietnam throughout the conflict.

Many of them were there to train, for example, North Vietnamese anti-aircraft crews to operate these quite sophisticated Soviet and Chinese anti-aircraft weapons. But they also have operational and strategic advisors. So that's not strange at all. I like a guy with those muscles who can operate an M60 with impunity and kill almost everyone around him. But when it comes to reality, nothing at all. You have to put a zero. Okay, let's set this scene. This is from "The Green Berets," and it was filmed in '66, '67, released in June of 1968. This is after the Tết Offensive, after the New Hampshire primary, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Johnson announced that I will not run again.

This is not the best time to release a film about Vietnam. It is based on theRobin Moore's novel called "The Green Berets." In this particular scene, this team of Green Berets 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, 1966, 1967, there are probably more Americans working alone. There would always be ARVN liaison with larger units, probably at battalion or regiment level. Certainly at the division level. The game must have been exciting, because I wouldn't listen to anyone else. You have six or seven guys walking in in combat gear and combat boots, on a seemingly non-squeaky pillar-and-beam wooden floor, and they don't notice.

It's totally ridiculous. And now we have to do this dramatically and we have to rappel down the second floor. Because apparently the kids who play mah-jongg still aren't alerted that something is going on. Ah, everything is going according to plan. So tripwire, is that a common thing for special forces to do? I would say no, because you want to be able to get out of there and get away quickly if you're on some kind of mission like this. But still, do you have time to do it? That is more of something that is established for a defensive position.

Can I have a rating of: It should never have been filmed in the first place? Zero. Completely. And I hate doing that because part of me likes some John Wayne movies. But this one, ah, no. This scene represents the battle for the city of Huế, which is part of the great Tết offensive in January 1968. What you just saw with the tank advancing, the marines behind the tank, yes, it is good policy. But then you see all the shooting. So it has been planned. But what I find funny is that the Marines get up and immediately enter that area where they just sighted and fired from a distance.

So if I was the bad guy, the enemy, I would have shot again while the Marines were there. But they don't do that. Now, to be clear, this is nothing like the city of Huế. In Huế city, there are no tall buildings like that. They are very dense buildings. There is not much room for maneuver. But here it seems really open. Partly this is because they filmed this outside of London at Beckton Gas Works. The only thing they get right is that, as it is outside London, it is cloudy. So during the battle for Huế, it was cloudy most of the time, making it difficult for air support to access.

Now, if you notice from the beginning, when the shots start coming from the building, it's not just a single sniper, there are several machine guns placed there. A sniper would have fired a couple of shots and ran out of there. These guys are in place, so it's hard for them to move. That's why the Marines respond by simply spraying the area with fire, trying to hit them. Alright, there he is taking a photo. It was not unusual for soldiers to have good cameras. Because sometimes they get R&R. You can go to Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, I should say, now.

If they are official, they can go to Hong Kong or somewhere like that, and they could buy really nice cameras for not much. And this would have been a PAVN sniper. PAVN snipers will pursue specific targets. VC snipers tended to use this tactic only to cause chaos and fear. Then you hit someone randomly. If you see a guy with headphones talking on the radio, he's probably an officer. You're an easy target. The visual part, the environment, for me, is all wrong. Aside from cloudy skies, that's realistic. I don't know. I'd probably give it a six. I don't think you need binoculars to see the enemy approaching, but it's a nice touch.

The scene is actually about the 1972 attack on Quảng Trị. So, the PAVN has occupied the city of Quảng Trị and the citadel, and the ARVN is trying to recapture it. And the ARVN, of course, has all the American material. So their uniforms were American style. That's right. So you have to remember that this is 1972, after the Easter Offensive. So at that stage, although technically the United States is still in the war, we are not doing much combat activity at that time. By then most of our troops will have left Vietnam. The equipment is good.

They have AK-47 and some RPGs there. So the PAVN unit shown here is a basic infantry unit. Yes, at that time, in '72, they already had tanks. They are a conventional force. The only thing they really don't have much of is air. You initially saw the advance gunner ordering artillery strikes, which did nothing, but there is no representation of him calling for a fire adjustment to hit, which I believe there actually would have been a fire adjustment. and they would have continued to fire on those APCs until they had gotten very close to the PAVN perimeter there.

So I think that part is not accurate. I like this film. Its production value is not very good, but the plot and the period in which it takes place and the way they represent the soldiers and all that, I like it. And this battle scene, even though the ARVN guys are exposed and all, I have to give it a six or seven, actually. I like this one. I have two favorite Vietnam movies. 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 like a harbinger of the problems that are going to arise.

The other one that I really like is "Good morning, Vietnam." Hey, thanks so much for watching. I loved it. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to see more, click on the video below.