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I remember a Captain, an aviator, observing a group of grunts toasting the inventory in a bar said: 'You damned inventory think you're the only people who exist'. You're damned right we do.1
The prologue to Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam (Bill Couturie, 1987) summarizes the film's agenda, reading: 'This film is about young men in war.' To be more specific, this film is concerned with the experiences of young American men serving in the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s. More so, the film unfolds to become not only the story of the soldiers' experience of Vietnam, but also the story of American families, politics, media representations and cultural debate. No one film can capture the Vietnam War in its enormity, but a film like Dear America can draw attention to the complexity of the issues, and summons some of the intensity of feeling that the Vietnam War generated within American society.
The theme of young American men serving in Vietnam has been played out in various Hollywood films, many of which were released prior to Dear America in 1987. Some of the notable Vietnam War genre films are The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978), Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), Rambo: The First Blood Part II (George Pan Cosmatos, 1985), Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986), Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987), Good Morning Vietnam (Barry Levinson, 1987), Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone, 1989), and even Forest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994). Each of these films tells a different story by focusing on a character's (or group of characters') experience of Vietnam and it's aftermath. When watching one of these films, the audience is able to get close to the characters, identifying with them and with their situation. When a character is defeated, the audience feels deflated; when a character dies, the audience feels a loss (however slight). In her study of films with World War Two settings, Jeanine Basinger argues that in watching these films 'the audience is ennobled for having shared their [the soldiers'] combat experience, as they are ennobled for having undergone it. We are all comrades in arms'.2 In this respect, when we attach to the cinematic character of a soldier, we can begin to...