Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Three Beautiful Things 07/30/18: *Two Days in October*, *Chopped After Hours*, Revisiting *Hearts and Minds*

1. The temperature topped out at close to 100 degrees today in Kellogg, so the Deke and I spent much of the day inside, keeping the house closed up and the fans going. We stayed pretty comfortable. I retired to the television room and poked around the offerings available from PBS's American Experience series. I watched a riveting story called "Two Days in October". It documented the events of October 17 and 18, 1967. It juxtaposed the horrifying ambush suffered by US troops at the Battle of Ong Thanh and the forceful action taken by the Madison, WI police in order to clear out a building at the U. of Wisconsin being occupied in a sit-in by students protesting the presence of Dow Chemical recruiters on campus. 

By moving back and forth between the terrible ambush the US soldiers suffered at Ong Thanh and the bloody force employed by the Madison police, the documentary provided a snapshot of, on the one hand,  the formidable challenges US forces faced fighting the Viet Cong, and, on the other hand, the growing tensions on the homefront as protests against the war increased and as more people across the country joined the protests after seeing the images of the Madison police clubbing and bloodying the students occupying the Commerce Building.

To me, the documentary's director, Robert Kenner, tied the two stories together by examining the lies that officials, higher ups, told about each event. To cover up the incompetence that led to the ambush, the Army brass both denied that an ambush had occurred and claimed victory at Ong Thanh; the police brass in Wisconsin portrayed the police officers as defending themselves against the aggression of the protesters, protesters who were sitting on the floor of the Commerce Building, packed in so tight they could hardly move. All of the photographs and videotapes documented that the police were the aggressors and the police officers interviewed for "Two Days in October" described themselves as initiating the clubbing of the students. Likewise, the surviving soldiers and officers who fought at Ong Thanh described the battle as an ambush in which the US forces were not only defeated, but decimated.

"Two Days in October" is based on a book by David Maraniss, They Marched into Sunlight.

2.  I've been immersing myself in the history of the Vietnam War years by reading about Watergate,  watching documentaries about the Vietnam War and the conflicts at home, and watching the two KSPS documentaries I watched about Expo '74.

I decided to take a break from this immersion and switched my attention to the Food Network and watched three episodes of my favorite Food Network show, "Chopped After Hours". In it, the judges from "Chopped" take on the challenge of cooking dishes using the weird combination of ingredients that "Chopped" contestants  have used. These chefs/judges are about a million times more adept in the kitchen than I am, and have ingredients in their pantry and cooking supplies at their disposal way beyond what I have on hand -- like I don't have an ice cream machine or a meat grinder!--, but I love watching their ingenuity. I marvel at the depth and breadth of their cooking knowledge. And, most of all, I enjoy that it's not a competition. The chefs all eat one another's masterpieces, heap praise on one another and talk in some detail about what they enjoy in the food, and they joke around and drink wine together. It's awesome.

3. During my senior year at Whitworth, probably in the fall of 1975, the word was out around campus that the Magic Lantern was screening a riveting documentary about the Vietnam War entitled, "Hearts and Minds".  Back in April of 1975, "Hearts and Mind" had won the Best Documentary Oscar and I was eager to see it, although very nervous. The movie unnerved me that fall. In 1982, when I bought my first videocassette machine (a BetaMax!), "Hearts and Minds" was being shown on the old cable movie channel, Spotlight, and I recorded it and watched it several times over the next few years.

Tonight, I rented "Hearts and Minds" from Amazon and watched the first half of the movie. My experience was similar to reading Elizabeth Drew's book, Washington Journal in that the movie was released shortly after the US had withdrawn troops from Vietnam, but the actual end of the war hadn't happened yet, In other words, the movie was contemporary with the war, looking at it as a current event, not looking back on the war so much. Much of the footage, by now, has become familiar thanks to all the documentaries and movies that have been made in the last forty years or so, but watching "Hearts and Minds" tonight reminded me how raw it all felt in 1975 and how shocked I was by the images of the wounded and dead soldiers and civilians, the man being shot in the head in Saigon during the Tet Offensive, and the destruction of the land of Vietnam. I'd spent time talking with and listening to veterans of the Vietnam War when I was a student at North Idaho College. It was as if "Hearts and Minds", back in 1975, gave me a concentrated tour in images and interviews of what these vets had talked about at tables we shared in the Student Union Building.

It's still overwhelming.

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