19 & Vietnam Requiem

Paul Hardcastle's "19" was an unlikely hit back in 1985. An innovative mixture of spoken word collaging and Afrika Bambaataa-style electro, the track made a few concessions to the pop crowd - in Hardcastle's words, "I added a bit of jazz and a nice melody" - but the dialogue, with its explicit emphasis on death, PTSD and, above all, the grim statistic that the average age of the US combat soldier during the Vietnam War had been "N-n-n-nineteen", seemed all but guaranteed to turn off mainstream palates. Instead, the record struck a nerve with the zeitgeist of the time - boosted, in no small way, by the renewed interest in the subject following the tenth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War - and went on to top the charts in multiple countries. Copious remixes have been created across the years, enough to fill up an entire compilation album for the record's 30th anniversary in 2015. Among these remixes are the "History Keeps Repeating Itself" version Hardcastle created in 2010 for the record's 25th anniversary, in which he drew parallels between the war in Vietnam and the current conflict in Afghanistan, and the PTSD mix created in support of the charity Talking2Minds in 2015.

The source of the track's dialogue was a 1982 documentary, Vietnam Requiem, directed by Jonas McCord and Bill Couturie and produced by ABC News as part of its long-running Closeup series. Narrated by Peter Thomas (the most prominent voice heard throughout Hardcastle's track), the 48-minute film focusses on one of several harrowing legacies of the Vietnam War - the high arrest rates among Vietnam veterans, which, the documentary tells us, are almost double those of non-veterans of the same age. Vietnam Requiem is comprised largely of talking heads pieces with five veterans who, at the time of the documentary, were each serving prison terms of varying lengths, but none of whom, Thomas stresses, had any history of criminal behaviour prior to their service in Vietnam. Interspersed among their accounts are snippets from archival ABC News broadcasts and stock footage of the combat, as Thomas draws continuous comparisons between the experiences of the Vietnam vets and those of their predecessors in World War II, identifying various factors that, added together, might account for the heightened sense of alienation felt by the former. The existence of Hardcastle's track was a source of some contention among the documentary's creators; not only did the use of audio samples result in legal hurdles, for which, according to the track's promoter Ken Grunbaum, there were no precedents, and which resulted in them having to pay royalties to Thomas, but ABC objected when the track's music video became its own remix project, collaging footage from the original documentary. But whether ABC likes or loathes it, the record remains a significant component of the documentary's legacy, and the success of Hardcastle's track can only have increased its profile among the general public.

The most prominent of the interviewees in Vietnam Requiem is Albert "Peewee" Dobbs, a former US Army sergeant currently serving a seven and a half year sentence for attempted armed robbery, who has the distinction of being the only soldier to be represented in the featured combat footage. Peewee is also the only veteran of the five who gets to recount the circumstances surrounding his crime in any kind of detail - for the remaining four, the actual nature of the crime is strategically concealed until the very end of the documentary, when we learn that they range from second degree assault to aggravated rape, the magnitude of their sentences from 2-6 to life. Strategic, I suspect, because the intention was for us to see the human first, and for their fall from grace to play less like the defining aspect of their story than a sombre epilogue which, given the bigger picture, has an air of haunting inevitability about it. The documentary hinges on the gulf between what is explicitly expressed and the emotional horror always lingering at the back of every monologue; the question as to what happened to these men, post-Vietnam, is both left dangling and, on another more intuitive level, answered all too starkly. It's an approach that, nevertheless, might end up backfiring for some viewers, as it risks rendering the documentary somewhat disingenuous, given its near-total unwillingness to confront the criminal component of its narrative directly. This was something that contemporary reviewer Tom Shales was highly critical of in his write-up for the Washington Post: "the precise link between combat duty in Vietnam and the fate of these five men is never clearly established; the program doesn't even look into it...when one learns that two of the men are serving time for rape, a great deal more explanation is necessary than is given."

I had a similar reaction to Shales regarding those final revelations, although it is difficult not to moved by many of the stories told in Vietnam Requiem, and by the means through which it targets another form of disingenuousness - the disingenuousness in society's inability, or unwillingness to comprehend the gulf between Peewee the model soldier and Peewee the attempted armed robber. At the start of the documentary we hear that Peewee was heavily decorated for heroism on return and, as per his presidential citation, his "devotion to duty and personal courage were in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service, and reflect great credit on himself, his unit and the United States Army." We later learn a disturbing story about Pee Wee during combat that seems far more in keeping with the traumatic realities of war - how, on one occasion, he brutally slaughtered a family of civilians on the assumption that they had been complicit in a Viet Cong ambush in which seventeen of his friends were killed. Peewee reflects that they paid the price purely because they happened to be present at a time when he thirsted for retaliation; he was driven by the impulsive belief that they had no right to live when so many of his companions had died, and that "somehow I had the right to make that decision". Peewee also ruminates on the extent to which he remains a prisoner of that moment, in a manner that clearly extends beyond the circumstances of his literal imprisonment. "Now I see those people just as clearly every night as I did on that day, and they're just as real as I am, or as anyone else is...and now when it rains I can smell death." Peewee's words, so haunting in their sombre articulacy, are counterbalanced by the more bluntly grotesque terms used by one anonymous witness to Peewee's tirade, who comments that "he turned them into jellyfish". What made the incident particularly appalling was the utter mundaneness with which it was apparently regarded at the time: "these officers looked over their shoulders like he had just dropped a two by four off the back of a pick-up truck on a job site."

Perhaps the documentary's preliminary point that War is Hell does not come as much of a revelation to us, but Vietnam Requiem has powerful words to say about the human willingness to dehumanise the other in times of conflict. This is something that Peewee reflects on at the end of the film, when he observes that "It seemed somehow like it was some kind of equation, how many human lives equals a human life, how many of your buddies equals one Vietnamese." Although his voice is far more sidelined compared to Peewee's, another interviewee, James McAllister, reflects on how it felt to return home and find himself the dehumanised other in another conflict that was still going on upon his own soil - the racial discrimination that he faced as an African American, which added to his sense of bitter disillusionment. Where Vietnam Requiem best succeeds is in the picture that emerges in the back-end of the documentary of the vets' inability to readjust to the world they had left behind. Having walked and observed the tissue-thin line between life and death, omnipresent in the arena of armed conflict, in which the human form can be reduced to something resembling beached jellyfish within the blink of an eye, the relative quietude of everyday living offered not a return to normalcy, but a banishment into unreality - exacerbated, Thomas states, among other things, by the brief window in which the veterans were expected to acclimatise from combat in the jungle to life in the suburbs. Unlike their WWII counterparts, who had largely returned home together in troop ships, soldiers typically left Vietnam alone, by commercial jet, within 48 hours of combat. The contrast between the two worlds was overwhelming - in Peewee's words: "Mom looked the same, apple pie tastes just as good. It wasn't home...it seemed that I had come from the most real place in the world. Maybe the only real place in the world, where things were measured in terms of lives and deaths." At this point, the talking heads sequences extends to members of Peewee's family, who reflect the fundamental incompatibility between the Peewee who returned and the ordinary life he had, for a time, attempted to resume. We learn that Peewee had attempted to redefine himself as a family man and, in one unsettling anecdote, came dangerously close to inadvertently strangling his wife one night during a particularly vivid flashback.

A striking motif that appears throughout the final quarter of the documentary is that of a sunset viewed through the oppressive mesh of a chain-link fence - symbolic, one presumes, of the dual entrapment of its subjects, captives of walls both literal and emotional, and of that faded, inaccessible future Peewee alludes to when he ruminates on the human cost of war, and the part of himself that perished along with those lives he was once so accustomed to taking: "You stop and you think about the sons, and the dreams, that aren't gonna be any more. Not just the people that you killed and the lives that you killed. And that does it for your own." Peewee's final words (prominently sampled in the "Final Story" remix of Hardcastle's track) are, "All we want to do is come home, that's all." Juxtaposed with the film's closing image, which shows a fence stretching off into the distance amid the increasing darkness of the night sky, presided over by the silhouettes of two watch towers, this seems a forlorn prospect. The film's unspoken conclusion is that there is no longer a home for any of these subjects, only  containment; their experiences have left them cut off and stranded in a no man's land, still too entrenched in the nightmare to be able to relate to the present, which itself offers only the bitter disillusionment of squandered hope and ruptured innocence. The literal prison fences glimpsed at the end seem to perfectly exemplify that state.

The crucial bit of data that took centre stage in Hardcastle's track - the documentary's claim that the average age of the soldiers was 19 - is here regarded as just one of many unhappy pieces of context. According to Hardcastle, this figure became the track's central hook due to limitations in contemporary sampling technology - he needed a sound bite that effectively told the entire story in two seconds, and the ages of the soldiers (seven years younger than their WWII equivalents) stood out as one of the most essential details. The emphasis on the number 19, and the youth of the subjects in question, is terribly troubling. 19, we would all agree, is a tragically young age to die. It is likewise a tragically young age to die the kind of figurative death explored in Vietnam Requiem. The number, in Hardcastle's track, becomes an exemplification of the no man's land in which the documentary subjects remain stranded, a shorthand for everything cruel and nightmarish about their situation; the manner in which the track fixates on and repeats the word conveys something of how that nightmare can only reverberate in the present. The voices we hear are mired in their experiences at 19, in the most chilling possible way - they were both too young to die, and old before their time.