by Alex Vernon
Alex Vernon of Peace is a Shy Thing discusses reality versus cinema during the Vietnam War, focusing on a unique experience of Tim O’Brien during that time.
One of the joys in conducting research for Peace is a Shy Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O’Brien (St. Martin’s Press, May 2025) was doing a deep dive into unit documents from O’Brien’s thirteen months as an infantryman in Việt Nam. As a former combat platoon leader, I took particular pleasure in assembling a map of his battalion’s area of operations from adjoining military mapsheets and—using the battalion’s daily logs to find dates, times, and grid coordinates—plotting his platoon’s and company’s movements throughout Quảng Ngãi province.
Although such research requires many, many hours of often bleary-eyed study of pages of pages of records written in military shorthand, I can’t recommend it enough for anyone, writers and other creatives especially, who wants to glean the life of a combat grunt in that war.
One of my favorite discoveries was an article in The Bayonet, 18 August 1969 (vol. 1, no. 12), the newsletter of the 198th Brigade, O’Brien’s battalion’s higher command. Sgt. Alfred Anthony Jr. wrote “Hamlets Watch Flicks”:
Kuong My—One time the show was so exciting a Montagnard shot an arrow through the movie screen.
Things were more routine in the small village [of] Kuong My four miles west of Chu Lai recently when the American Division’s mobile audio visual team, working with the 198th Brigade, was showing its nightly movie.
But for candles and a kerosene lantern the village was dark. The children filed in and out of a sombre [sic] cement home buying sodas and rice animal crackers from a girl called Susie.
Capt. William D. Hyde (Merced, Calif.) and 1st Lt. James Porter (Washington, Mo.), 1st Bn., 6th Inf. civil affairs officers, had brought the team to this small hamlet, as they do 20-to-29 days out of the month to one isolated location or another.
“The purpose is to bring information on recent government changes,” said Capt. Hyde. “The people in most of the villages in the brigade’s OZ have no means of keeping informed—they don’t get newspapers.”
“During the election,” added LT. Porter, “we showed films where the candidates spoke their views directly to the people—it was a big help.”
For many villages, the American movie team is their only link with the outside.
The backbone of the 7th PSYOPS Bn.’s Det. 3 team is an ingenious three-quarter-ton truck with its familiar “Snoopy on his doghouse” painted along the sides. The audio-visual container on the back houses its own generator, portable screen, projector and film library.
In Kuong My, during the reel changes the Americans got shouts of “Batman! Superman!” from the children swarming around the truck, while the village elders sat raptly in front of the screen, interested in current news features about their country.
“These movies are all in Vietnamese,” said 1st Lt. Homer T. Hodge (Paramount, Calif.), team leader. “But a lot of times we show westerns, and as long as they’ve got good action we’ve got a good audience.”
“Part of our job here is just to provide entertainment,” Capt. Hyde interjected. “It’s not propaganda—we just show the films and hope they enjoy them. Everywhere we’ve been we’ve found enthusiastic audiences.”
“In the mountains in a Montagnard village we found the most enthusiasm ever,” said Lt. Porter. “We were showing a cowboy and Indian flick, and the tribesman actually thought the movie was real. They got so caught up in it that in a scene where the Indians were charging toward the audience two men got up an put crossbow arrows through the screen.”
But when the show’s over the village square takes on an atmosphere strangely reminiscent of an old, familiar movie house. The crows thins out and files between the dark houses to the outer reaches of the village, and Kuong My goes to bed—a little better informed.
This in a war in which U.S. soldiers dubbed anything outside the wire Indian Country and Vietnamese guides Kit Carson scouts, in the war Michael Herr in Dispatches said “was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along.”
That issue of The Bayonet also featured a mimeographed photo of “Television and motion picture star Sarang the tiger” posing with the bikini-clad “August calendar girl Marilyn Oliver.” Apocalypse Now tried to bring it all together by dressing its entertain-the-troops dancing playmate trio in skimpy cavalry, cowboy, and Indian costumes, but in this case the true story, those Montagnard crossbowmen firing at images of actors who resembled them more than either did the soldiers, is better than the fiction.
From Prairie Village, Kansas, Alex Vernon graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (the only literature major in his class of over a thousand), served in combat as a tank platoon leader in the Persian Gulf War, and earned a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The recipient of an Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award and a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship, he is the M.E. & Ima Graves Peace Distinguished Professor of English at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. This is his eleventh book.
