Arts of War on the Web

It’s a safe bet that just about every American who took part in the Vietnam War heard tell during his or her tour about a renegade G.I., usually an African-American, living among, and fighting for, the Viet Cong. Those stories had the taste, feel and smell (metaphorically speaking) of urban legends, Vietnam War style.

On the other hand, it turns out that there is compelling evidence that at least one black American solider, McKinley Nolan (above), did go over to the other side in 1967. Nolan, who grew up in a rural area of Texas, joined the Army in 1965, a year after he got married. He went AWOL in Vietnam sometime in 1967, and reports soon surfaced that he joined a VC unit, married a Vietnamese woman, and that they had a child.

Nolan’s trail went cold until 1973 when reports surfaced that he and his Vietnamese family were living with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The trail went colder still in 1977 during the Cambodian Holocaust when McKinley Nolan and his family disappeared near Chamkar Caffee Village in Cambodia. His American wife Mary and the rest of his family has not heard anything from him, or from the U.S. military or government, in all those years.

In 2005, Vietnam veteran Dan Smith on a trip back to the former war zone, ran into an African-American man in his age bracket in Tay Ninh City. When Smith (above) asked the man his name, he mumbled something that Smith believes was “McKinley Nolan,” and then disappeared. That brief chance encounter opens the new riveting, intriguing documentary The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan (Corra Films), which is making the rounds—and winning accolades—at film festivals across the nation.

The film, directed by Henry Corra, begins with Smith, who was seriously wounded in Vietnam and also suffered emotionally after his tour of duty, relating the tale of the strange meeting in Tay Ninh. Then Corra’s cameras capture Smith’s emotionally charged visit to McKinley Nolan’s wife Mary and other members of his family in the spring of 2007 in Washington-on-Brazos, Texas.

The story then moves to October 2008 when Corra (a protégé of the great documentary filmmakers David and Albert Maysles) and company accompanied Smith and McKinley’s brother Michael on a trip to Vietnam and Cambodia. Corra’s entourage included a translator and the journalist and author Richard Linnett (The Eagle Mutiny), who had been following the McKinley Nolan story for a decade.

Linnett “told me that Lt. Dan Smith was traveling to Texas to tell the Nolan family of his recent sighting of McKinley in Vietnam,” Corra says on the film’s website. “I asked if I could be there with my camera. Immediately when I first met Smith and the Nolans a bell went off in my head where I knew we were about to embark on a life-changing journey together.”

The heart of that journey took place during the Vietnam-Cambodia trip. In Vietnam, the family met several former Viet Cong, who told them tales of their brother, including, they said, the fact that he killed two or three MP’s before he went over to their side. The Americans also met McKinley’s Nolan’s stepson, a Vietnamese man, who accompanied the group to Cambodia.

In Cambodia, Smith, Michael Nolan and company found several former Khmer Rouge fighters who knew Nolan and his Vietnamese wife. The Americans then went to the remote area where Nolan and his Vietnamese family were last seen in 1977. After talking to the Cambodians, the Americans were all but convinced that McKinley Nolan, his Vietnamese wife and their child were killed by the Khmer Rouge during the time of the Cambodian “Killing Fields.”

One of the most arresting scenes in the film is the site of a Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command helicopter descending under Michael Nolan’s watchful eye in January 2009 at a recovery site set up by JPAC where they believed McKinley Nolan was killed. The fact that this occurred certainly was the result of the family’s visit in September 2008 with their member of Congress. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, who told Mary and Michael Nolan that she would get on the case. Corra captures the scene in Jackson Lee’s office very well.

The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan is a first-rate production. The cameras bore in on the faces of the film’s players relentlessly and effectively. The story spins out slowly and picks up steam every step of the way.

My only problem, a relatively minor one, was Corra’s use of war-time footage to give the story more heft. Too often, he chose images that didn’t fit the narrative—-most egregiously, two iconic pieces of film, ARVN Gen. Loan’s execution of a VC prisoner on the street in Saigon during Tet of ’68, and the shots of recently napalmed South Vietnamese children. Most of the other war-time footage fits into the narrative; those two did not.

Aside from that small misstep, The Disappearance of McKinley is a superb documentary that deserves to be widely seen.

Ceremonies today in scorching Washington, D.C., marked the completion of the restoration to its original finish of the “Three Serviceman” statue at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The $125,000 project was set in motion by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and the National Park Service this spring.

The reason: The statue had suffered from more than two decades of weather beating and the well-meaning hands of millions of visitors. The original bronze finish had turned prominent parts of the sculpture—primarily the mens’ faces, arms, hands and weapons—greenish-blue.

The statue, by Frederick Hart, was dedicated in 1984, two years after The Wall was dedicated. The restoration was done on site by New Arts Foundry of Baltimore, under the direction of two artists who had worked with Hart. The National Park Service, which maintains the Memorial and its grounds, contributed $25,000 toward the statue’s restoration. Many corporations, veterans organizations and individuals also contributed to the statue’s restoration.

Jeff Stein, the former editor of The VVA Veteran, today writes the “SpyTalk” blog on the Washington Post web site. His latest column, headlined “Nixon-CIA Spy Ploy in Vietnam Backfired, New Records Show,” deals with new information about the 1970 Cambodian incursion–new and enlightening information about how Nixon and his Vietnam War guru Henry Kissinger operated.

As Stein–who served as a U.S. Army intelligence officer in Vietnam–notes, Nixon and Kissinger, his national security adviser, “deliberately ‘leaked’ word to North Vietnam that U.S. forces planned to invade Cambodia, in a failed attempt to intimidate Hanoi into retreat.”

That info came from recently declassified data in a new volume of Foreign Relations of the United States, the official State Department history of the era. The news was unearthed by Merle Pribbenow, a retired CIA expert on Vietnam who found hitherto undiscovered documents in State Department records.

Stein quotes Pribbenow as saying that the idea behind Nixon and Kissinger’s psychological ploy “was to make the North Vietnamese believe that they had obtained advance knowledge of a planned U.S. operation in order to frighten them into pulling their forces back. The end result was that, not only were the North Vietnamese not frightened out of doing what Nixon wanted to scare them out of doing, Nixon unintentionally gave them advance warning of what the U.S. was about to do.”

What’s more, Stein notes,  “the ploy, in short, ended up foiling Nixon’s main goal for invading Cambodia: to annihilate Hanoi’s command post for staging attacks on South Vietnam.”

There was an interesting feature article in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago about Tim Page, the iconoclastic British photographer who made his reputation for his fearlessness (some say recklessness) covering the Vietnam War.

Times reporter Seth Mydans accompanied Page into Cambodia in June on the latest of his many post-war missions to try to find the remains of the photo-journalists Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, who disappeared in 1970 looking for Khmer Rouge guerrillas.

Page, 66, who  received a severe brain injury from a mine explosion in Vietnam, led the visit to a village where he believes Flynn (the son of Errol Flynn) and Stone were killed and buried. “I don’t like the idea of [Flynn's] spirit out there tormented,” Page told Mydans. “There’s something spooky about being M.I.A.”

It’s fitting that Oliver Stone’s newly mustachioed face makes him look sort of like a South American politician.  That’s because his just-out documentary, South of Border, is an up-close and admiring look at a group of South American politicians.

It will come as no shock to anyone who is aware of Stone’s politics and his film-making to learn that those politicians, including Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia, lean solidly to the left. Or that Stone’s documentary is being torched by conservative media.

That’s nothing new for the screenwriter, director and filmic provocateur who has roiled the political waters with many of the more than two dozen movies he has written, produced or directed. That list includes Salvador (1986), Platoon (1986), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), JFK (1991), Nixon (1995) and W (2008).

The former 25th Infantryman’s  latest feature film is Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

Nelson DeMille  keeps churning out well-reviewed, best-selling thrillers. Case in point: his 16th book, The Lion (Grand Central, $27.99), another fast-moving, plot-twisting thriller/police procedural staring wise-cracking NYPD homicide detective John Corey.

The book came out in mid-June and moved right up the best-seller lists. DeMille, who still lives in Long Island where he grew up, commanded a First Cav platoon in Vietnam in 1967-68.

The pretty darn good documentary, William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, written and produced by the two daughters of the flamboyant, radical lawyer who made his name defending the Chicago Seven, will be broadcast tonight on many PBS stations.

For more info go to the PBS “Point of View” website, and our review of the doc back in December of ‘09.

“Japan R&R: 1969″ is the name of the new exhibit opening on Saturday, May 29, at the National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago (formerly known as the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum).

Every Vietnam veteran knows what the exhibit’s title means. For you civilians, the Pentagon, in its wisdom, gave those of us who took part in that war a five-to-seven day break, called R&R (“rest and relaxation”). We were flown to exotic getaways to get away from the war, including Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney, Bangkok, and Kuala Lampur.

The exhibit includes some in-country combat photos, but most illuminate what GI’s did on R&R in Japan.  Japan R&R,  which is sponsored in part by Jerry Kylisz and Jennifer Komorowski, runs through November 1 at the museum (above), which is located 1801 S. Indiana Avenue. There will be an artists’ reception at the Opening from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m.

The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Admission is $10, but is free to museum members and active duty military and dependents. For more info, go to the NVAM’s web site.

Planning for the official Texas state Vietnam Veterans Memorial has been going on since 2005 when the Texas Legislature authorized a monument on the grounds of the State Capitol in Austin to honor the Lone Star State’s some 500,000 men and women who served in the Vietnam War.

The granite and bronze monument (above), which was designed by the sculptor Duke Sundt, is expected to be dedicated early in 2012. It is being funded solely through private donations under the aegis of the Texas Capitol Vietnam War Monument Committees.

The latest news is that the committees have just released a redesigned and re-focused website for the monument. It contains a link for donations, which are tax deductible.

Way back in 1983 WGBH, the Boston PBS station, produced the ambitious, acclaimed 13-hour documentry, Vietnam: A Television History, an in-depth look at Vietnam’s wars based on Stanley Karnow’s best-selling book, Vietnam: A History.

Now comes the ultimate bonus material: “The Vietnam Collection,” an on-line video archive that contains most of the materials gathered and created for the 1983 series, as well as additional Vietnam War-related material from WGBH’s archives. That includes all the interviews (with people such as Gen. William Westmoreland, North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, CBS News correspondent Walter Cronkite), news stories, still photographs and original footage.

It’s all there on the website.