Word: viet
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...L.B.J. Ranch was a little too far away for regular visits, so Lyndon Johnson used to chopper off to the camp with three or four friends in tow. He also found the retreat an ideal locale for some Viet Nam War jawboning with skeptics like Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson. Recalls L.B.J. Aide Jack Valenti: "It was a frosty meeting, but they parted friends. There's something about Camp David that makes you feel softer...
...regime of Premier Pol Pot in Phnom-Penh. But that could not work. Observes Don Tretiak, an American China watcher: "The Chinese should have been more careful about their Cambodian commitment. Supporting a weak but obstreperous ally is very bad politics." Now Peking fears that its deteriorating relations with Viet Nam will push Hanoi further into the embrace of Moscow. Worst of all, if the Vietnamese were to rout the Cambodians, a Kremlin-manipulated puppet regime could emerge in Phnom-Penh and tilt the balance of power in Southeast Asia in Moscow's favor...
They said it couldn't be done. They said that no one could ever make a Viet Nam war movie as silly as John Wayne's legendary get-the-gooks epic, The Green Berets. But now we have The Boys in Com pany C, Sidney J. Furie's account of Marine warfare in the paddyfields, circa 1967-68. This inadvertently hilarious film is the Dien Bien Phu of war movies...
Furie, unlike Wayne, is on the side of the doves, but a brief exposure to the garbled ideology of Company C might per suade even Benjamin Spock to take up arms. The complex historical drama of Viet Nam becomes as mindless as a Saturday-morning cartoon. The bad guys are loutish American officers obsessed with body counts and South Vietnamese preoccupied with heroin smuggling. The good guys are the Marines in Company C, all of whom, apparently, fought the war against their will. The Vietnamese peasants are represented by picturesque extras who seem to be refugees from a way ward...
...making niceties as it is of its subject. Com pany C was shot in the flat light one associates with porno films; its often incomprehensible plot contains more credibility gaps than a William West moreland press briefing. Though Furie staged much of the film on location in Asia, the Viet Nam he re-creates is as placid as the Hollywood he built for Gable and Lombard. Even the sting of death is absent: this may be the first war movie ever to climax with a ponderous soccer match instead of a battle...