The Green Berets was produced and released in 1968. Starring John Wayne, the epitome of American strength and honor at that time, The Green Berets gave a rationale for American involvement in Vietnam. 1968 was the year of the Tet Offensive, a political and psychological victory for North Vietnamese Communists. It was also the year of the Battle for Hue and the My Lai Massacre. But the ballad of the Green Berets, popularized in the film, would soon be overshadowed by criticism of the war as subsequent movies and popular music challenged American views regarding Communism.
Movies Impact Views of Vietnam
By the time the Vietnam War ended in 1975, Americans had heard hundreds of anti-war pop and folk songs and watched several Vietnam themed movies. It was the decade of the 1980s, however, that produced the most films about Vietnam, at least 190. By the 1990s this number began to decrease to just over 118 with many of those offerings falling into the documentary genre. Since the start of the twenty-first century, a scant dozen movies were produced, again primarily documentary with the notable exception of We Were Soldiers.
We Were Soldiers was released March 1, 2002 and told the story of the 7th Cavalry Regiment in Vietnam in 1965. This was the year after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that gave President Johnson a virtual “blank check” of executive power to escalate the war in Vietnam and commit hundreds of thousands of US soldiers. We Were Soldiers premiered the year after President Bush received similar powers via Congressional resolutions to conduct the war in Afghanistan that began October 7, 2001. Various books written about the early years of the Bush administration, like Scott McClellan’s What Happened, intimate that the invasion of Iraq was already on the table.
