In 1972, the drawdown of US forces began, in earnest; and, by 1973, most combat units had departed Vietnam and the Paris Peace Accords had been signed. In 1975, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese and the Vietnam civil war, for all intents and purposes, came to an end. America quickly moved on from Vietnam, as much due to the exploding scandal of the Watergate break-in, in which the President of the United States was implicated in a criminal conspiracy. Facing a likely impeachment and removal from office, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency and Vice President Gerald R Ford was sworn in. Vietnam still cast a shadow over American life and politics. A post-war recession was devastating the economy and inflation and high unemployment became the norm. The OPEC oil embargo worsened things. The Election of 1976 pitted President Ford, running for the office for the first time (Ford is the only president never elected to the presidency or vice presidency, having been appointed Vice President, after the resignation of Spiro Agnew), against former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter. Ford's pardoning of Nixon, the entire Watergate scandal, the failing economy, the legacy of the failing in Vietnam all dogged Ford, as well as public images as a klutz, reinforced by repeated sketches on the then new and massively popular Saturday Night Live and public recordings of tripping and falling, led the relatively unknown Jimmy Carter to the White House. An amnesty was eventually declared for draft evaders, though many who fled to Canada remained, as they had assimilated into Canadian life. The Draft was officially ended.
The 1970s are often depicted as a period of hedonism, economic despair, rampant violent crime and corruption, and the emasculating of America. Much of that has to do with popular entertainment of the 1970s. Economic conditions were dismal, which fueled rising crime rates. However, as politicians looked for scapegoats, the statistics for arrest rates of combat veterans became a target for some. Stories of Vietnam veterans being arrested, in post-traumatic episodes, were rampant. The term "post-traumatic stress disorder" first came into wide use, mostly associated with Vietnam veterans. TV and movies often featured troubled vets who commit violent acts, who then have to be brought down in a gun battle, with police. Stories perpetuated the idea of veterans just "snapping."
In general, Hollywood had stayed away from Vietnam, after The Green Berets, apart from MASH, which used to cover of being set during the Korean War, to make commentary about the Vietnam War, and war, as a whole. References were mostly background detail for characters. Even things like the GI Joe toy line had switched from a military context to an adventure context, as Hasbro changed their marketing of the toy to tout the GI Joe Adventure Team, creating playsets, like the Mummie's Tomb Adventure, and providing a non-military foe, for play.
In the late 1970s, this began to change. Several movies started to look at the Vietnam War, in hindsight. 1978 was a watershed year, which saw the releases of the films Go Tell The Spartans, The Boys in Company C and Coming Home. The first film tells the story of an advisory group, in 1964, tasked with reoccupying the village of Muc Wa, which had been the site of a massacre of French soldiers, during the French attempt to resecure the colony. It starred Burt Lancaster and a young Marc Singer and Craig Wasson and depicted the futility of the mission, the corruption on the South Vietnamese side, and the brutality of the war. It was done on a small budget and was not a success, though it has gained a reputation over the decades.
The Boys in Comany C follows a group of Marine recruits, from boot camp to deployment to Vietnam, where they encounter the insanity of their missions, and find an escape via soccer. The film is notable for an early appearance by former Marine and Vietnam vet R Lee Ermy, who worked as a military advisor and appears as a DI, in the boot camp section. The film was filled with young actors, like Michael Lembeck, Craig Wasson, Stan Shaw and James Whitmore Jr, as the older Marine lieutenant, who commands the platoon. Again, it is an outright anti-war film, showing the violence and absurdity, as well as the complete lack of an end goal.
Coming Home is a bit more nuanced a film. Jane Fonda portrays a Marine wife, married to career officer Bruce Dern, who is deployed to Vietnam. A friend gets her involved in volunteering at a VA hospital, where she meets traumatized veteran Robert Carradine, as a young soldier traumatized after only a few weeks in-country; and, Jon Voight, as a disabled veteran who is angry and frustrated with his situation. The pair were high school classmates and they are reunited, as Fonda helps Voigt adjust, while he helps bring her out of her own circumstances. A relationship develops and they have an affair, knowing that her husband will return, at some point. Voigt chains himself to the gate of a recruiting office to try to stop others from joining the war, while Carradine's character commits suicide. Dern returns home, with a self-inflicted wound and his own PTSD.
The film focuses heavily on the traumatic effects of the war on those who survived, without ever really providing a counter-point, in someone who is not struggling with PTSD or physical disability, or some other consequence. The film earned Fonda and Voight Academy Awards, as did the script.
1978 was also the year of Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, with Robert Deniro, Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep. The film follows three friends, from a Pennsylvania steel mill town, to Vietnam and the aftermath. The three friends are captured by the VC and subjected to games of russian Roulette, before escaping. John Savage's Steven loses both legs, while Christopher Walken's Nick is psychologically damaged and stumbles into a gambling den, where he plays Russian Roulette, for money. Deniro's Mike is the seemingly least affected, but, he finds that hunting no longer provides him peace and he cannot shot a deer he has in his sights. He is alienated from his friends, who did not go to Vietnam. Here, again, we see the dehumanizing aspect and the idea of the traumatized vets.
1979 saw the release of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, a feverishly insane film, based upon Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, as a special operations soldier is tasked to travel via swift boat deep into enemy territory and locate a renegade Special Forces colonel, who is fighting his own guerrilla war against the North Vietnamese, and "terminate his command." The boat journey is filled with horrors and absurdities and the further they go, the more extreme the event. Eventually, the soldier comes face to face with the rogue colonel, who is succeeding in his mission, by becoming as inhumane as his enemy. The film is noted for a sequence where Robert Duvall's AirCav unit transports to boat upriver and engages in an air assault on a suspected VC village, to the sounds of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyrie."
In 1980, while American citizens were being held hostage, in Iran, the US election came down to incumbent President Jimmy Carter and former actor and governor of California, Ronald Reagan. Carter was dogged by the recession, which was starting to show signs of improvement, when US agriculture took a hit, as the administration placed an embargo on grain sales to the USSR, as a protest to the invasion of Afghanistan. The failure of an attempt to rescue the hostages left the government and military looking weak and Regan's campaign focused on a return to America's fabled glory, the post-WW2 Eisenhower era (while ignoring the negative aspects of that period). Reagan won the election and the administration began a program of building up the military and pouring money into the Defense industries and removing restrictions on corporate mergers, media holdings and investment banking. Reagan, who had served in the Army Reserves and was called to active duty, during WW2, but was unfit to serve in combat, used the military as a sign of returning American strength, soon greenlighting the use of military force in several locales, including greenlighting a military invasion of the Caribbean island nation of Grenada, which was in the midst of a power struggle. US forces seized control of the island and extracted some 600 American medical students who were used as justification for the intervention, as the administration feared another hostage crisis. The presence of Cuban advisors on the island was of a greater concern, as it signaled an expanding Cuban sphere of influence, in the Caribbean and Latin America. The operation was also carried out just two days after a car bomb at the Marine barracks killed 241 Marines, in Lebanon, on peacekeeping duty.
In some circles, particularly on the Right, talk began to increase that the US military won every engagement against the North Vietnamese and VC, but that the politicians did not have the will to take the fight to the North and end the Communist rule. the war was painted as the product of the Democratic administrations of Kennedy and Johnson, ignoring the original commitment of American support and forces, under the Eisenhower Administration. Such ideas began creeping into movies and filled popular pulp fiction, like the Executioner series of paperbacks, which inspired Marvel's creation of the Punisher. It slowly began seeping into films, particularly action films, with a more Conservative viewpoint. The 1983 film, Uncommon Valor, straddles the line a bit, as a retired Marine colonel obsesses about his MIA son, captured during the extraction of a LRRP team. He finds evidence that he may be alive, in Vietnam, and recruits his former team members to conduct a POW rescue mission. The film is a mixture of the idea that the US "won all of the battles, but lost the war," and the idea of traumatized vets, as seen in Fred Ward's Wilkes, who suffers from deep PTSD. other team members are depicted as leading fairly normal and productive lives, apart from Tex Cobb's Sailor, who is in protective custody, after killing a biker gang leader. Some show the psychological effects of the war, but it is presented not as the horror of war, so much as the way the war ended, without vitory and being seen as running out on the South Vietnamese and the MIA soldiers.
The same director, Ted Kotcheff, the previous year, had adapted a David Morell novel, First Blood, from 1972, about a Vietnam veteran Special Forces soldier, pushed too far by a redneck sheriff, who takes to the mountains and ends up engaging in a guerrilla war against the authorities. In Sylvester Stallone's hands, the film becomes more about not winning the war, than being traumatized by it. The sequel, Rambo, hammers home the point as John Rambo returns to Vietnam to locate potential American POWs and asks Col Trautman, his mentor, if he gets to win, this time.
Then, in 1986, veteran Oliver Stone, who had written the screenplay for the film Wall Street, wrote and directed a film based on his experiences in Vietnam. Stone had written the screenplay, in 1968 and had been trying to sell it for years. Stone had enlisted, in 1967 and served with the 25th Infantry Division, in Vietnam, as well as the 1st Cavalry Division, where he earned a Bronze Star and Purple Heart with oak leaf clusters (designating the second awarding of the Purple Heart). Stone was eventually able to get a producer and distributor and made the film, featuring Charlie Sheen, as the POV character, based on Stone, and Wilem Dafoe and Tom Berenger as the two sergeants who exert influence over him. Former Marine officer and journalist Dale Dye was hired to put the actors through a simulated boot camp, to learn to be soldiers, to be more authentic on screen. The film was released to great success and won Stone the Best Director Oscar, as well as the Best Picture, plus awards for Best Cinematography, Film Editing and Sound, while Berenger and Dafoe were both nominated for Supporting Actor.
Now, Vietnam became a topic for discussion again and more and more memoirs and historical accounts emerged. Films such as Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal jacket and Francis Ford Coppola's Gardens of Stone mixed with actioners like the Chuck Norris Missing in Action films and lower budget films, like Hamburger Hill and The Siege at Fire Base Gloria.
Within comics, Vietnam was still mostly background detail, for characters like Deathstroke or The Punisher. War comics were mostly gone, with DC the last holdout, though most of theirs were laid to rest by 1985. Marvel had cancelled Sgt Fury in 1981, with the final handful of issues being reprints (with the series fequently reverting to reprints, before a new batch of stories).
In 1980, Larry Hama, who had worked as an assistant to Wally Wood and done penciling work for Atlas/Seaboard and Marvel, as was an editor for DC, came back to Marvel, as an editor. He was the editor on Crazy, the Conan titles and was the writer for the licensed GI JOE comic, where he had created backstories and names for characters used in the toy line, based on an unused Nick Fury proposal he had made, called Fury Force. In 1985, he was the editor of a newly relaunched Savage Tales magazine. the previous Savage Tales had been launched in 1971, as a companion to Conan and then became the home to Ka-Zar, lasting 12 black & white issues. This new Savage Tales was to be an anthology, focused on adventure and action stories, in the vein of the mens adventure pulps on bookshelves and spinner racks. The end result would be a mix of sci-fi/post-apocalyptic action, aviation pulp adventure, historical adventure and a pair of stories about the Vietnam War, written by a veteran, Doug Murray.
Doug Murray had been around the fringes of the comic book world, for a while, mostly in fandom, but he had written for Monster Times, some fan publications and a pair of novels in the Destroyer pulp adventure series. Murray had served in Vietnam, in 1968 (through the Tet Offensive, in the Da Nang area) and again, in 1971, on special assignment. In 1972, he tried to interest DC Comics into doing a Vietnam story; but the company declined, citing the atmosphere and the ongoing war, at the time. Larry Hama contacted him to do a Vietnam War story for the first issue of Savage Tales; and, what emerged, was "5th to the 1st," by Murray and artist Michael Golden, which was set in "the 'Nam, 1967."
The story is told from the POV of Lt Roger Young, frsh out of college and now with the 1st Cavalry Division. he introduces us to the rest of the platoon, including Sgt Rich Heidel (on his 3rd tour), Spc 5 Amil Pawley, the Quaker medic, Spc 4 Garland Bremby, the radioman, Sp4 Paul Hogan, an Australian actor....no, wait, wrong one....an M79 grenadier, PFC John Dufts, a rifleman. He then talks about heroes and tells the story of Santos, a Puerto Rican, from New York, who was their machine gunner. The platoon was sent up along the DMZ to set up an ambush on a VC jungle trail. They helo in to an LZ and then hump to the area and set up their ambush. The VC come along and hit the trip wires, setting off their claymore mines and the platoon unleashes on the VC.....
The team then heads out for their LZ, for extraction, passing though a remote village. The village is quieter than the journey in and we soon learn why, as the VC open up with heavy machine guns, taking out half the column. The rest are pinned down. the LT has Hogan fire his last HE (high explosive) round at the read gun position, but the range is too short and the grenade doesn't rotate enough to arm it. It embeds in the wall of the hut where the machine gun is firing. Santos, who is badly wounded, gets to his feet and charges the position, firing his M60, along the way.
He slams into the wall and the grenade, knocking it loose and it rotates enough to arm and explodes, destroying the machine gun and its crew. The survivors are able to hurl grenades and return fire on the other position and escape, then call in a medevac. Santos is put up for the Medal of Honor and wins, posthumously.
The story is brief, lasting 7 pages. It does the job of introducing us to the characters and placing us in the middle of a typical operation in Vietnam, an ambush on a suspected VC jungle trail. they engage the enemy and then run into their own ambush, where Santos sacrifices himself to save the platoon. In the course of the story, it mentions that Santos was keen to fight and prove himself a hero, to be considered a "real American." The others just want to survive their tour.
Doug Murray did an interview with Dwight Zimmerman, for David Anthony Kraft's Comics Interview, issue #53. In it, he described his time in Vietnam and how it was different from WW2 and Korea. He remarked that in those conflicts, a soldier was "in for the duration." In Vietnam, a combat tour was 12-13 months, and soldiers counted down the days until they would leave. For the previous wars, one day was like the next and they got on with the job at hand. For the Vietnam soldier, it was about survival until you got your orders home.
Michael Golden provides a feast for the eye, capturing every detail, like the linked ammo belt for Santos' M60, the correct ammo pouches for the M-16, with the 20 round magazines, the grenades, a PRC-25 field radio. He captures how soldiers would carry some personal items in the retaining band of their helmet cover, like mosquito repellant, cigarettes, gun oil, etc. He has the men wearing the correct jungle boots, not the leather combat boots often depicted in the 1960s stories that were set in Vietnam. If that sounds nitpicky, imagine hiking for hours through jungle in leather boots, which retain water and don't "breathe." Imagine the foot rot that comes with constantly wet feet. Now, imagine wearing different boots, with hard rubber soles, leather lower sections, and canvas uppers, that are a couple of pounds lighter, have vents to drain out water and let air flow in them. Which would you rather wear all day, every day, in a tropical environment? The attention to the details lends an air of authenticity to the stories, as veterans, especially, or students will pick up on those things.
This is not a typical war comic. Yes, it does present a heroic character; but, most of them just do their job. A couple of them experiment with drugs, except in the field. the sergeant is an alcoholic, functional in combat, a mess in garrison. The officer is not a West Pointer and not a career man; he just wants to get home, after his tour, and get a nice paying job somewhere.
It captures the difference between even Korea and Vietnam. A lack of a definitive strategy and end goal, soldiers who are there for 12 months, then rotated home, just as they are becoming experienced enough to be a strong unit. Soldiers taking drugs to escape their reality. Officers who aren't in it for the glory or to gain promotion (though there were their share of them).
This is not the Vietnam of Shotgun Harker & Chicken, or Capt Hunter and his search for his brother. This is the way it was, for many. It isn't glorified, but it also doesn't portray the stereotypes of marauding soldiers killing villagers, drugged out killers, mental cases, or gung ho super soldiers, taking down a dozen VC as they die. There are no John Rambos.
The same issue also features a story by Archie Goodwin and John Severin, called "Avenger," about a man hunting a German SS officer, who joined the French Foreign Legion and served in Indo-China. he is hunted by a Frenchman, who joins to locate him an exact revenge, for killing his brother in reprisal for a resistance ambush. He ends up being saved by the man and brought out of the jungle, to safety. The German goes on to win the Legion of Honor, at Dien Bien Phu, but the Frenchman still murders him, in Paris, in 1955, to avenge his brother.
The issue receives praise from an Air Force NCO and another fan, looking for more accurate stories of Vietnam. Now, a generation too young to have experienced the war are of age and want to know more about that era, which so dominates recent history.
Issue #4 features a return of 5th to the 1st, with the story "Sniper."
LT Young and his team are returning from a recon mission, on a suspected supply route, which turned up empty. A call comes in from a group of marines under fire, in an area allegedly pacified.. Reinforcements are 30 minutes out, but the 1st Cav is closer and Young okays their re-routing to aid the Marines. As they come into the LZ, a sniper bullet hits the pilot, in the neck and the helo heels onto its side. Young is shook up, but okay.
The other helo provides covering fire as the 1st Cav platoon takes positions and returns fire. The sarge goes in to check things out, after the firing stops and returns with a single Springfield 1903 bolt action rifle, with sniper scope, a relic of the previous war. The sniper was a young woman and LT Young thinks of his little sister, back home...
This war makes no sense, to him.
Here again, a basic mission and a brief, but violent engagement with the enemy, and a discovery that one sniper held down a platoon of Marines. The soldiers try to make sense of it, both that the VC can be so dedicated, and the idea of a young girl, killing their buddies. It's madness.
This all belies the fact that several Russian women fought as snipers, in WW2 (as well as combat pilots) and that there were unsubstantiated stories of French women, lovers of German soldiers, sniping at Allied soldiers. These stories spread quickly and were picked up by reporters, though there was no evidence to support such claims. Still, a woman can kill as easy as a man.
That was it for 5th to the 1st, in Savage Tales. The magazine only lasted 8 issues; but, towards the tail end, Jim Shooter presented Larry Hama with a mock up of a cover, with the title The Nam, using a repurposed GI JOE cover. He asked Hama to develop a proposal for a series, set in Vietnam and Hama used the 5th to the 1st stories as a template. The end result was greenlit and it became a surprise hit, garnering outside media attention, when DC seemed to get the lion's share, with things like Dark Knight and Watchmen. However, a third story had been draw and lettered and it ended up being printed in the 8th issue of The Nam, titled "The Tunnel Rat."
The 1st Cav are testing the new 20 mm Vulcan gatling gun, on an APC (Armored Personnel Carrier) and have been tasked to check out some VC rest and supply points, along with the weapon....
Leaflets are dropped over the villages, to warn them that the Army is coming. The village is deserted, when they arrive, but they mow it down, with the Vulcan, to make sure. A search of the remains finds nothing and they start to move out, when PFC "Fats" Duff falls through an entrance to a tunnel. They call it in to intelligence, who is sending people to check it out. LT Young tasks Duff and Sp5 Frank "Fudd" Verzyl to stay and mark the entrance, while they move to the next village. Fudd was a tunnel rat and loved going down holes, after the "Wascally Wabbits." While Duff catches some Zs, Fudd takes his sidearm and a flashlight and goes into the tunnel complex, but finds nothing. He comes across a door and hears sounds behind it. Thinking it must be a map room, with an intelligence NCO still there, he kicks through the door and is confronted by hundreds of rats. They charge out, having been shut in what had been food storage and the food was gone. Fudd comes screaming out of the hole, firing his weapon back at the rats. It takes time for Duff to calm him down and get the story. By that point, intel has shown up, in the form of a green 2nd lieutenant, who gets a shaky report from Fudd and decide he wants to go down and look and wants Fudd to guide him. Fudd starts to panic and explain, but the "butter bar" threatens to court martial him if he disobeys his order and Fudd does the only thing he can.....
He shoots the lieutenant. he is arrested and faces court martial, but is an obvious Section 8. He is strapped to a gurney for flight back to the US. He sees the ramp lower from the C-130 and the tunnel inside and lets out an ear-shattering scream.
In part, this story was inspired by Hama, who had been a tunnel rat, at times, in Vietnam. Tunnel Rats were usually small guys, who could slip into the tunnels and move around, armed with a pistol or shotgun and a flashlight. The tunnels were often part of major bunker complexes, complete with sleeping quarters, map rooms and food and ammo storage. It was part of the system that the VC used to disappear and then reappear and attack again. Some soldiers spent months living in those tunnels, periodically launching attacks.
Although the magazine didn't sell well enough, The 5th to the 1st garnered enough positive feedback that Jim Shooter thought there was a potential audience for more stories of Vietnam and turned to the editor, Larry Hama, to put together a book. Using the team from these stories, Doug Murray and Michael Golden, he came up with The Nam, our next subject.
The 5th to the 1st really sets the template for what would come, in The Nam; but, with less of a conceptual vision behind it. These were more like random war stories, from a veterans memories. Although a group of characters are presented, we never really get to know any of them. In the first story, we are introduced to several, but only Santos is a major participant. The second has the LT and sergeant as main actors, but mostly reacting. Tunnel Rat features a new character. The Nam took these disparate stories and them gave the idea a linking device to drive the series: each issue would take place at one month in a character's tour of duty. 12 issues would equal a whole tour. The series would begin in 1966 and continue until the series was cancelled or they reached 1972, when the drawdown began. So, it was a limited concept, from the offing. As we will see, next time, it struggled to stay relevant, after that first year.
One thing you will notice in these stories is little talk of the politics of the war, whether it was right or wrong; just the frustration of fighting an enemy that disappeared and the repetitive nature of their missions. Military Intelligence is treated as an oxymoron (that's by definition) and authority has no idea what it is doing, as superior firepower isn't stopping the VC attacks and the situation doesn't seem to change. To many of these veterans, that was the experience of Vietnam, short, fierce engagements and a lot of repetition, with no clear end in sight, other than tick off the days until their tour was over and they flew back home, to finish out their 2 year stint in the military, at some stateside duty station (or in Europe). Doug Murray served in Vietnam, then rotated to Korea, before he was brought back to Vietnam , for a 4 month stint, on special duty.
One final note about the title to the feature, 5th to the 1st. This is Army speak (specific to cavalry) of the 5th Battalion of the 1st Division, or 5/1. Consider it in terms of Band of Brothers. The soldiers portrayed in the story were part of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division.