Sisters in Arms: Remembering the League of Wives

We’ve all seen our share of Vietnam movies. Once the war was finally over, Hollywood released a flood of them. There were ambitious ones that dropped us into the middle of the fighting—The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon—and tried to convey the physical and emotional realities of that faraway war. There were films like Born on the Fourth of July (based on the true story of Sgt. Ron Kovic) that highlighted revolts against the war by young men furious at what their own government was asking of them. The poignant Coming Home focused on the home front, where the wife of a Marine captain evolved during his tour of duty into a more independent woman. In finding her own path, she fell in love with a young vet who’d left Vietnam a paraplegic. This heartfelt 1978 drama won Oscars for stars Jane Fonda and Jon Voigt.

The physical and emotional costs of Vietnam are also underscored in a new book by my friend and colleague, Heath Hardage Lee. She’s currently rocking the media with The League of Wives, a well-researched history of the loyal military spouses who waited—as much as six years—for their husbands to come marching home from captivity by the Viet Cong. Here’s the book’s subtitle: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took on the U.S. Government to Bring Their Husbands Home from Vietnam. As this suggests, these women (over a hundred in all) turned to activism as a way to alert the world to their husbands’ plight. Their men, most of them Navy and Air Force pilots, had been shot down and incarcerated, often in the notorious Hanoi Hilton, where torture was rampant, medical services were few, and (in violation of the Geneva Convention) oversight by the International Red Cross was not allowed. Even a basic accounting of prisoners’ whereabouts was denied the worried wives and family members back home.

What makes The League of Wives so striking is that it’s about women well accustomed to following the rules. Politically and socially conservative, they had been carefully taught that the best way to support their spouses was to dress nicely, respect military rank, and steer clear of politics. Once their husbands were shot out of the sky, these women—still unclear as to whether they were wives or widows—were instructed by the top brass to remain tight-lipped and allow politicians to sort out the problem. But, as months and years passed, staying quiet seemed like the wrong strategy. Presidential administrations largely paid lip-service to their concerns, and the military actually toyed with the idea of denying them access to their husbands’ accumulating paychecks. That’s when the women, many of whom had young children to raise, banded together and began making noise.

The wives quickly discovered the value of the mass media in putting their husbands’ plight before the world. Soon they were sending delegations overseas to make their case to diplomats meeting in Paris and Stockholm. And, much as they shrank from affiliating with the anti-war movement, they took advantage of its connections with Hanoi in order to ensure a flow of mail to and from their captive spouses. When the men finally returned in 1973, they found their wives had developed strong new capabilities. Even the once-shyest was now comfortable in the corridors of power.

The evolution of these women would make, of course, for a fascinating movie. That’s why the very enterprising Reese Witherspoon has just optioned Heath’s book for a cinematic adaptation. Which should make for a “hidden figures” type movie I look forward to seeing.

 

On Memorial Day—Monday, May 27—Heath Hardage Lee will be speaking at the Richard Nixon Library as part of a program honoring the wives and mothers of American POWs. Here’s more info: https://mailchi.mp/nixonfoundation/b860feer3l-1299905?e=f5e67dc507 

The Many Sides of Rashomon

My friends are well aware that right now my favorite movie has to be The Graduate. After all, my book on this marvelous 1967 comedy (Seduced by Mrs. Robinson: How The Graduate Became the Touchstone of a Generation) came out in 2017. In the line of duty, I have watched The Graduate maybe 150 times, and have never failed to enjoy it. I’ve got loads of other favorites too. But for years I’ve had my own little pantheon of classics that I consider the best of the best. This triumvirate includes an American movie I’ve adored since childhood, as well as two foreign-language classics that never fail to awe me.

The American movie is Citizen Kane, a 1941 faux-biopic by twenty-six-year-old wunderkind Orson Welles, telling the story of a newspaper publisher’s rise and fall in a style that starts out rollicking and ends up poignant. One of the two foreign films on my short list is Federico Fellini’s mesmerizingly beautiful  La Strada (1954), anchored by Giulietta Masina’s haunting performance as a good-hearted waif in a traveling circus troupe. And the other comes from Japan.

Akira Kurosawa made Rashomon in 1950, not long after the end of World War II. Its budget was paltry and the film was not well liked in the country of its origin. But it developed a passionate following both in Europe (where it was the hit of the Venice Film Festival) and in the U.S., where it won an honorary Oscar that was a precursor to today’s Best Foreign-Language Film category. I’m writing about it now because I’ve just learned of the death, at age 95, of Machiko Kyo, the one woman in Rashomon’s tiny cast. She played the aristocratic wife in a strange and brutal triangle that’s at the film’s center. Her long career included Mizoguchi’s classic Ugetsu and the role of an Okinawan geisha opposite Glenn Ford’s American military captain in Teahouse of the August Moon (an east-meets-west comedy in which Marlon Brando donned yellow-face to play a local interpreter). But it’s Rashomon for which she’ll be remembered.

Rashomon, an artful blending of two stories by Japanese master Ryunosuke Akutagawa, is set back in the days of the samurai, Central characters include two travelers, a samurai and his lady, who in the course of their journey encounter an audacious bandit, played to the hilt by the young Toshiro Mifune. The dramatic juxtaposition of these three leads to the death of the samurai, the rape of his wife, and the disappearance of a valuable dagger. But what exactly has happened? Before a legal tribunal, the bandit narrates an account full of derring-do, in which he emerges triumphant from a duel with the samurai. The wife’s version of the tale emphasizes noble self-sacrifice, with herself as the central figure. Even the dead samurai is heard from. Via a medium, he aggrandizes his own heroic role. But wait! It turns out there’s been a silent witness to the whole episode, and his account turns upside down everything that’s gone before.

Today the so-called Rashomon effect is so well-known that many of those who reference it have never seen the movie. And Kuroaswa’s storytelling powers are such that others continue to crib from his work, especially for movies in the western genre. Hollywood quickly turned Kurosawa’s epic Seven Samurai (1954) into The Magnificent Seven (1961). And his Yojimbo, once again starring the dynamic Mifune, saw a second life as A Fistful of Dollars. Even Rashomon had a western incarnation, in 1964’s The Outrage, with Paul Newman as a bandido who doesn’t come close to filling Mifune’s shoes.