Haunting to watch Bob Hope Christmas specials

Bob Hope with Raquel Welch

I had the opportunity to see Bob Hope twice, first when he appeared at the State Fair grandstand in the '70s. The show was boilerplate Bob Hope. There was the predictable Bob Hope sexism, baked into the cake at that time. When he called a female singer back out for extra applause, he said "isn't she pretty?" not "what a fine singer." You just had to understand his generation.
He told the joke about Thorndike the Grasshopper. A bartender looks down and sees a grasshopper, and says "I'll bet you don't know we have a drink named after you." And the grasshopper looks up and says "you mean you have a drink named Thorndike?"
The second time I saw Mr. Hope was in his twilight when he arrived by small plane in Willmar, there to depart for a fundraiser which I believe was in Montevideo. Can't remember the particulars, but I do remember hearing that the turnout was not good for that. Mr. Hope's star had evidently faded as it does for all celebrities. I was in Willmar by coincidence, visiting my friends the Cruzes, old Morrissites.
I seek here to make an absolute proclamation: There is nothing more haunting than to view the opening of a Bob Hope TV Christmas special from the 1960s. Those specials were filmed in Vietnam. At the time we'd get a rush of good feeling viewing that on TV. We knew war was a sobering task but we were glad to connect Christmas with our cause of fighting for American ideals, i.e. against communism. Communism was such a boogeyman in the post-WWII years. Eisenhower warned us against the military-industrial complex. Perhaps the veiled interests saw a need for some kind of profound conflict on the planet.
Here were masses of U.S. soldiers assembled around a stage in Vietnam. Bob Hope pranced onstage with his signature golf club. He was a smooth and professional entertainer. He had sort of picked up the torch from W.C. Fields when the latter was fading. Part of his shtick was to act cowardly, so it was ironic he was on the cutting edge with jingoism, by appearance, for Vietnam. Vietnam! What a defining backdrop for my generation.
We have access to the old TV specials today thanks to YouTube. What don't we have access to?
The TV camera cut to a random close-up of several soldiers during the Hope performances. Those "grunts" were always laughing so enthusiastically. Maybe they were happy because being at the performance gave them a reprieve from their regular duties.
 
War with the dreadful "body counts"
It's no fun raining on parades, but the truth is: Vietnam was an even bigger hellhole than the worst impressions you have ever gotten from movies etc. Around 60,000 American lives were lost. Young people with potential just snuffed out.

The war lacked the kind of "front lines" that were standard in previous wars. In lieu of that, "body count" was the measuring stick. People my age remember watching the network evening news with those body count numbers for us and the enemy. I remember seeing the initials ARVN which I guess was our ally. Imagine "body count," i.e. the deaths of human beings, as a means of judging success in a war. Here's a very tragic offshoot of that: the grunts were suspicious of the motives of superior officers, fearful that their lives would be sacrificed in order for a superior to get a commendation or promotion based on body count. That fear was the driving force behind "fragging." Technically speaking, fragging was death by a fragmentation hand grenade, but it came to denote mutiny in general. It has been said that fragging or mutiny was the main reason - not that there weren't other substantial reasons - why the U.S. had to depart that place when it did. 

Bob Hope with Ann-Margret

When did the Bob Hope Christmas specials from Vietnam end? The last one was probably 1970 or '71. America had woken up to the pointlessness of it all. The unrest on the domestic front was staggering. It was beyond what young people today could fathom. So much of what was wrong with the Vietnam war appeared to be in plain sight. Our communications leaders were probably cowed by not wanting to seem negative in the face of patriotic cries. The inhibition faded, as with Morley Safer's "Zippo lighter" story (how a Vietnamese village could be burned with a simple Zippo lighter). The realization was slow as molasses in arriving.

Lessons to be applied today
I can't help but see a parallel to today: the obscenity that is the Trump administration has not truly been called out by the media. Again there is self-interested fear on the part of media people. The Wall Street Journal had a policy at least for a while of not using the word "lie" to describe anything Trump said. I wonder if it's still in place. The urge is to be deferential to the people in power, until the facts become too hard to resist.
We hope the Mueller report, if it's not successfully spiked by that Whitaker fellow, will be the eye-opening time of realization. A cavalcade of exposes will develop and grow until there is a real meme, as what happened with Nixon, that Trump was a toxic influence on our nation.
What if the Nixon tapes had never come out? What if those recordings had never been made? Serendipity allowed the needed breakdowns to happen. Will serendipity happen again? Can we all sit idly by and let the climate of the planet steadily worsen? If in fact we have a grand and glorious ending to this present episode, akin to Nixon flashing his 'V' symbols outside his helicopter, then we can feel good about the American system working.
Oh my, there will be a flood of books and such to line the pockets of the publishers and movie big shots! Problem is, we cannot assume such a happy ending. Michael Moore has strongly cautioned us: Trump has an instinct for winning.
A scandal flies in our face which in a normal world would be resolved appropriately. An obscure judge like Kavanaugh comes forth with the president's blessing only because this judge has indicated he defers strongly to presidential powers. Perfect for an autocrat. Sensational allegations come forward vs. Kavanaugh. We watch media coverage and assume it's just a matter of time before the judge withdraws or is voted down. But, Susan Collins gives a dramatic speech and then the guy is in!
Moore cautions that the episode follows a pattern of Trump simply winning. The media in the meantime get the sugar high of realizing such great ratings (commercial success) as these debacles proceed.
 
Enduring dubious legacy of Vietnam war
The Vietnam war left scars on my psyche partly because I was an avid news consumer for my age, going all the way back to preschool (in St. Paul). I am instinctively skeptical of the machinations of people in power, even at the micro level, due to having grown up during Vietnam. The U.S. was outdone by an eighth rate military power. It happened in one of the least significant countries in the world. We soaked in the news about it, through filters that made it conform somewhat to how we viewed WWII. Let's "pray for our troops" etc.
News coverage showed us war scenes not unlike WWII when our cause was so virtuous. World War II was in fact hell. The more that comes out about Vietnam today, through the myriad sources of information like YouTube on the Internet, the more stupefying it is. We saw the implementation of the "low IQ soldier" in Vietnam because the more advantaged young men found end runs around military service. How many deferments did Dick Cheney get?
George W. Bush certainly got a spot in the National Guard and we cannot fault him, just like we cannot fault anyone who found a way to escape. So, that was the backdrop for my youth: instead of building our ideals, the young men crafted ways - anything they could think of - for simply getting out of military service. I wrote a feature article for the Morris paper on a Cyrus school administrator who went to Australia to escape. As a kid you became grim in your outlook toward life.
Shall we blame Bob Hope? I guess not. He was just a professional entertainer. Someone was going to fill those shoes.
We see the openings for those old TV Christmas specials and they are designed to uplift us and make us feel happy, happy I guess about our U.S. being such a force for good. We hear those strange (by our standards) place names from around Vietnam. We hear the strains of introductory music from "Les Brown and his Band of Renown." So uplifting if you look at it superficially. We see Hope bring out the kind of females who you might say arouse the hormones of young men - very sexist fare. The men were supposed to get bug-eyed over that, I guess. The camera might have panned around to get some lustful looks.
 
War brings tragedy for Brainerd MN
Forget the smiles and laughs: Vietnam was one of the biggest and most pointless hellholes in world history. My family had a close friend from Brainerd who was killed by friendly fire in 1966. We attended the funeral. As a child I was never persuaded by any of the pro-war rhetoric. Was our family friend (Richard Ungerecht) "fragged?" He wasn't literally fragged because a grenade was not in play.

Richard Ungerecht RIP

Based on accounts, he had some command authority and he was positioning his troops on the perimeter of a LAM (land to air missile unit). The story goes that he lost track of where he was, got out too far and was mistaken for the "enemy." I put "enemy" in quotes because the troops could never know for sure who their allies and enemies were, among the ethnic Vietnamese. Could the soldiers have feared they were being sent out as cannon fodder as it were? The speculation is most unpleasant but it cannot be resisted. BTW Mr. Underecht's mother was the sister of my mother's best high school friend. Us boomer kids got so much wholesome entertainment in the 1960s. Such huge irony: the same decade that gave us the heartwarming Dean Martin, Perry Como and Andy Williams Christmas specials, was also the time for the Vietnam war. It was the decade of the classic Don Knotts comedy movies. My father loved those. And then there was Vietnam.Today we have the specter of Russian interference in our elections. If someone with the KGB savvy of Vladimir Putin saw fit to do this, he knows very well the disruptive consequences for our nation, perhaps even the existential threat to our nation. Can we come out on the other side of all this?

- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com