Word: lai
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...battlegrounds. So what was the 61-year-old filmmaker doing sitting in an airport lounge in Danang this week, watching himself lighting incense during a temple visit on local television news? Researching another Vietnam movie, of course. His latest project, Pinkville, focuses on the investigation into the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which U.S. troops slaughtered as many as 500 unarmed Vietnamese villagers. He spoke to TIME Vietnam correspondent Kay Johnson about parallels between Vietnam and the Iraq conflict, his old Yale classmate George W. Bush and why he won't be making the Great Iraq War Movie...
...Because of Iraq. That's a major reason. I had no intention of making a fourth Vietnam movie at all. But this last year - you know my feelings about the Iraq war of course - I think the time has unfortunately come back around to remember events like My Lai...
...Lai? Because it's a great story. I was [serving] in Vietnam at the time, and it really made an impression, and I think it changed the course of the war to a large degree. Americans were shocked, as well as the Vietnamese. You have to take into account that many Vietnamese villagers were neutral. It turned many neutral villagers against us. It was an interesting turning point...
...easy, but I can understand it. I mean, you saw a bit of it in Platoon. Not on this scale. But that's part of what the movie shows, visualizes, dramatizes - the peer pressure, the tension. [My Lai] happened. It's a fact. It's history. I'm not seeking to denigrate the average soldier. There was a breakdown in that division and there was a breakdown from the top. And I think it had a lot to do with the war policy, which was basically body counts, kill ratios, search and destroy, free-fire zones - these concepts, when they...
...Staff writer Andrew E. Lai can be reached at lai@fas.harvard.edu...