Over the Mountains and Into the Sea - 1969 and then Some - page 60

We didn't know reality as perceived by the Viet vets, because they went, so they weren't
like us. We sympathized, especially with those who realized too late the difference between
martial law and civil law, and that they should have declined when they had their civil rights.
Those who made it back were viewed curiously at first—keep in mind that the My Lai
massacre occurred in March of '68, and the military covered it up for over a year. Up to five
hundred unarmed villagers of all ages were raped, otherwise tortured, murdered and mutil-
ated. The direct cause presented by the military: war stress on valiant troops who broke with
so much evil coming at them. In the end, events at the village of My Lai were deemed a mas-
sacre, all the murderous carnage pinned on one soldier sentenced to twenty-two years for so
much mayhem. He served three years of house arrest.
How could anybody participate in a massacre? Oh, wait; they weren't feeling quite them-
selves. They'd become killing machines by necessity, and you're bound to have a massacre or
two in those unfortunate conditions. Or some such.
Concurrently emerging in those pivotal years, two other events eliminated the tiderip
between the two major war resistance camps. The first of those events was general. Fragging
occurred frequently as a quirk and soon becoming a pattern, then a phenomenon, then an
explosive act of opposition. Wikipedia today defines fragging as:
In the U.S. military, fragging refers to the act of attacking a superior officer in one's chain of
command with the intent to kill that officer. The term originated during the Vietnam War and
was most commonly used to mean the assassination of an unpopular officer of one's own fighting
unit. Killing was effected by means of a fragmentation grenade, hence the term.
The jungle war spawned movies of profound impact— Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter,
Good Morning Vietnam, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and many more, including the
benchmark of reasoned insanity, Apocalypse Now —
. . . suddenly he'll grab you, and he'll throw you in a corner, and he'll say, 'Do you know that
if is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and
blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you' . . . I mean I'm . . . no, I can't
. . . I'm a little man, I'm a little man, he's . . . he's a great man! I should have been a pair of ragged
claws scuttling across floors of silent seas . . .
Dennis Hopper found himself in a character truest to type, and Apocalypse Now was rendered
in masterstrokes, adhering to a tried and true literary gem, Heart of Darkness . Touching on
Joseph Conrad's key characters and lines—like he horror, the horror, the horror — Apoca-
lypse captured the drift of reason from secure moorings in war. Marlon Brando as Colonel
Kurtz pegged Conrad's Mr. Kurtz but then stepped out—and up to sainthood with the most
reasoned defense of men engaged in violence. Such a lengthy statement seemed like a mono-