Tunnel Rats (2008) – on rental. Of the major conflicts that’s taken place in the last 100 years or so, one that I still consider myself relatively unfamiliar with is the Vietnam War. The war has its roots in politics, as is typical of these events, but the period of Indo-Chinese history after the 1945 events is as convoluted as the wrestling of control for Palestine.
Interestingly, while the Vietnam War itself is considered America’s most controversial military action – so much so that George Bush Sr. had to repeatedly state that the first Gulf War would be nothing like the Vietnam one – there’s been no lack of films and productions exploring the American role in the conflict. There was The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), Oliver Stone’s unforgettable Platoon (1986), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and more recently Mel Gibson’s We Were Soldiers (2004) – blogged briefly here before but will write a longer entry sometime too. And many of these films have been critically acclaimed and gone on to win many, many film awards.
While each of these films have examined different aspects of the conflict, none as far as I can remember have really looked at the ‘tunnel rats’, or more specifically the underground search and destroy missions that the American soldiers undertook to flush out the Viet Cong. Briefly, hundreds of kilometres of underground tunnels were created during the war for the Viet Cong to hide and live in.
These tunnels caused the American occupying forces a lot of grief (think ambush and lots of deadly traps), and the US Army expended no small effort in attempts to destroy or neutralize these tunnels. It was the oldest match-up you can think of: modern technology against age-old human ingenuity and the willingness to live in the harshest conditions imaginable in order to fight the enemy.
Long write-up, so continued in the next post.
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