By BAADASSSSS
Hamburger Hill
20th Anniversary Edition
Directed by John Irvin
Starring Anthony Barrile, Michael Boatman, Don Cheadle, Kieu Chinh, Don James
Lionsgate
Release Date: May 20, 2008
The final word of spoken dialogue in Hamburger Hill — other than the cold, mocking voice of the radioman constantly barking out the orders that send young men to their untimely ends in a tone most people use to order take-out food — sums up the mind-boggling horror and chaos of the Vietnam War in a way no other word can.
“Fuck.”
By the time the Vietnam War officially ended in 1975 with the final withdrawal of American personnel from the capital city of Saigon, the horrific nature of the events encountered on a daily basis by the hundreds of thousands of soldiers, who were mostly drafted when they were barely out of high school, had managed to penetrate the government’s usual media propaganda firewall and find their way onto cinema and television screens. No longer were the American people being exposed to the type of gung-ho patriotic entertainment that fueled support for World War II. The harsh reality of Vietnam was exposed for all to see, the pointless bloodshed and mass destruction committed in the name of the desire of a bunch of chicken hawk politicians to rid the world of Communism had been laid bare in the nation’s living rooms. The media exposure would prove to be useful in fueling the growing anti-war movement across the country.
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