Seven Red

At dusk, while we were all stretched along the canal bank eating dinner, two Marine gunships came down on us and began strafing us, sending burning tracers up along the canal, and we ran for cover, more surprised than scared. “Way to go, motherfucker, way to pinpoint the fuckin’ enemy,” one of the grunts said, and he set up his M-60 machine gun in case they came back. “I don’t guess we gotta take that shit,” he said. -Michael Herr, Dispatches

While popular history generally locates the shock of the Tet Offensive in Saigon – where the American Embassy compound was breached and where Lt. Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan summarily executed an NLF soldier in front of American news cameras – some of the most vicious fighting was going on to the north, in Hue. There, Marine 1/5 and 2/5, along with the Cavalry and ARVN units, battled PAVN regulars for a major Vietnamese city. The siege of the Citadel of Hue lasted most of the month of February, and was beamed into American living rooms in all its horror.

We get the narrative version of the Battle of Hue in Stanley Kubrik’s Full Metal Jacket. In the Vietnam portion of the film, the action follows the Marines of Hotel Two Five (H Company, Second Battalion Fifth Marine Regiment), and a Stars and Stripes journalist and photographer who have joined them from Da Nang. Michael Herr, who I’ve been quoting in this segment, wrote much of the dialogue for FMJ, and a lot of it comes straight out of Dispatches. Herr also wrote Willard’s voice over in Apocalypse Now: “Never get off the boat. Absolutely goddamn right.”

Kubrik’s film often gets flak from veterans groups because the setting looks nothing like Hue. Indeed it doesn’t. Kubrik filmed it in the same bombed out apartment complexes where he filmed A Clockwork Orange. In England. (In a strange connection, she‘s English cousins actually run the company that provided the palm trees for FMJ. The company provides flora and fauna for English films; they also did all the floral arrangements for Four Weddings and a Funeral.) I actually like Kubrik’s decision, and its devious anti-naturalist wink. It doesn’t matter what Hue really looked like, Kubrik seems to be saying. From the point of view of the American military, the whole war was like World War II redux, so why not make the Hue look like a bombed out European city? Anexact representations are usually more telling – yet more evidence of Kubrik’s genius.

I might have to get back to naturalism some time soon. I love The Wire, but I do find it disturbing that people praise it for being so “realistic.” When did we all turn into Emile Friggin’ Zola again?

In any case , if we want to go from the anexact to whatever shadow of the Real that combat photography allows us to hold on to, Hue is the place. The pictures that came out of the three week battle were virtually uncensored, and raw as can be. The following image – taken by Stars and Stripes photographer John Olson, is perhaps one of the most famous pictures of the war. Depicting wounded Marines being brought back from the battle line down a street dubbed “Rocket Alley,” the image ran as a giant two page spread in Life Magazine in late February, 1968. Click the pictutre for the larger image to get the full effect.

Wounded from C and D Company, First Battalion Fifth Marine Regiment being evacuated from the Citadel, 15 February, 1968.

One more from Herr:

“It was at this point that I began to recognize almost every casualty, remember conversations we’d had days or even hours earlier, and that’s when I left, riding a medevac with a lieutenant who was covered with blood-soaked bandages. He’d been hit in both legs, both arms, the chest and head, his ears and eyes were full of caked blood, and he asked a photographer in the chopper to get a picture of him like this to send to his wife.” -Michael Herr, Dispatches

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