As I said in my review of Michael J. Allen’s Until the Last Man Comes Home, I wish the book had covered pop culture’s treatment of the supposed hundred of Vietnam POWs still in enemy hands. Having just watched RAMBO: First Blood Part II (1985), I figure I’ll plug that oversight, with the help of some research via Michael Lee Lanning’s Vietnam on Film and Eric Lichtenfeld’s Action Speaks Louder.
POWs had played a role in films about the Korean War and World War II (and we’ve had historical dramas dealing with Civil War POWs). Vietnam, however, was different. Where WW II films have shown escapes (The Great Escape, Von Ryan’s Express, The Birdmen, Escape from Sobibor), Vietnam War prisoners almost never escape (Chuck Norris pulls it off in Missing in Action). They’re stuck there in brutal conditions until the US negotiates a POW release or Rambo, Braddock and other 1980s action heroes come and rescue them.
This mini-genre began with the 1983 movie Uncommon Valor, based on a failed attempt to bring prisoners home, followed by the first of three Missing in Action films in 1984. It was Rambo, in 1985, however, that became the archetype. In other media, an issue of the 1980s Jon Sable, Freelance comic book showed our boys were still there; the 1984 TV series Airwolf has the protagonist’s obsession over his MIA brother as a major plot point.
Lichtenfeld suggests it taps into the same American themes as The Searchers, (which Susan Faludi discusses in The Terror Dream) of captives taken by savages and needing rescue. They also reflect Reagan’s embrace of dubious claims about POWs, his insistence we need to definitely account for every MIA, and his administration’s insistence it was “morning in America” (Rambo takes it as a given that MIAs are possible POWs until proven otherwise). No more feeling bad about Vietnam or wondering if it was good to wage war on Communism; we were America! We blow shit up for justice!
Sure enough, Rambo and his fellow Vietnam veterans go into ‘nam in these films, but they’re unambiguously good guys. The Vietnamese are just as ambiguously the bad guys. In Rambo his commander, Trautman (Richard Crenna), realizes Rambo’s mission was to explore a camp the government knew was empty; when he finds real live POWs, the mission is terminated, leaving him to die (Fools! As the poster says, the higher ups forgot they were dealing with Rambo). Trautman furiously snarls that “it was a lie, like the entire war!” A lie which blasted much of North Vietnam into ruins and got thousands of Vietnamese killed, but that’s not the issue; it’s the waste of American lives that pisses Trautman off.
There’s a lot more to Rambo‘s themes, even though it’s not a good movie. I’ll be getting into them in an upcoming post.
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Andre Norton’s WITCH WORLD was an insanely weird genre mash-up when I read it in the 1970s (about ten years after it appeared). Simon Tregarth begins as a veteran forced into a life of crime which is about to get him killed. A mysterious occultist offers him an escape via the Round Table’s Siege Perilous, which magically takes anyone who sits in it to the world they belong.
I’ve long been curious about A THIEF IN THE NIGHT (1972), 
If it wasn’t for the dogs, she’d be welcome. But they don’t seem particularly friendly, and testing whether they could be might end up with one of them getting a bite or a scratch. So we’re trying to stay firm and not let her in, though we sure feel guilty about it.
Robert Bloch’s social satires often veer into the sexist. He’s also extremely cynical. That made Bloch’s optimistic 1968 feminist novella, LADIES DAY (which I have as part of a double book with 
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I’ve been gradually working through the first WONDER WOMAN: The Golden Age Omnibus (by William Moulton Marston and artist Harry G. Peters), which starts with her debut in All-Star Comics #8, then movies into her lead series in Sensation Comics and then her own book (which was a big deal back then — nobody got a solo book if they weren’t A-listers). While I’m not finished the book yet — it’s large, and this is back when one issue was 64 pages — it occurred to me that I ought to give it some of the same in-depth treatment I give the Amazing Amazon’s later eras. So this post, I’ll work through the material in Wonder Woman #4, which culminates in the redemption of Nazi spymaster Paula von Gunther.
agents: Deception, Conquest and Greed. Wonder Woman #2 is a book-length battle against them, taking Diana to Mars (where Mars has his base). Having a book length arc was unusual for the day: issues of Superman and Batman had four unrelated stories.
I’ll be back with the rest of the volume when I finish it in a few weeks.
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