Go Tell the Spartans

I have been thinking about the post to explain the gibberish in the title of this blog, about speeding SUV’s. But I am diverted by a film I just watched; Go Tell the Spartans (www.imdb.com/title/tt0077617/). It is a relatively obscure film made in 1978 about the early days of Vietnam. It seems now fairly cliché and predictable, but for the time it is impressive. The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now were made somewhere around then, so it is hardly alone or ground breaking. What makes Spartans worthy of a post was the eerie sense that I could be watching something about Iraq. The sense of not knowing who can be trusted, the confusion about the mission, the deals that have to be cut to get the local military to take action, and the casual violence directed toward the locals by US military and even more by other locals. You know, yeah sure, Vietnam is a jungle and yeah, 9/11 changed everything, but it is real hard to escape the feeling that here we are again, hitting the same notes, even if the harmony is different (beat that metaphor). We seem to be winding down, and the casualties are only 25 hundred instead of 50 thousand. But you have to wonder about the wide eyed patriotism some volunteers showed. Did the WWI veterans feel the same way about WWII?