Departures

Last night we watched Da 5 Bloods, the new Spike Lee film now streaming on Netflix. Recommended, that is all I can say. The film is many things, including a whimsical re-rendering of the 1948 classic, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, complete with the iconic line: “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.”

The film tells the story of four African-American men, far past their physical prime, who return to Vietnam to recover the body of a comrade/hero as well as a fortune of gold they hid when the comrade died during a fire fight. From the joys of recovered friendships to the frantic ending, the film covers what one can only imagine is the memory-stained experiences of African-Americans who have gone to war for America. Although a Vietnam Veteran myself, I can no more imagine their demons and ghosts than I could imagine the despair of American Indians who died at Wounded Knee.

The film is thus to be viewed with an open mind and open heart, the latter of which will be ripped from you several times during the two-plus hours of the film.

Why I choose to depart from my normal obsession with the Sermon on the Mount today may contain some tenuous thread to the film. Why do Americans who received such shabby treatment from their countrymen and countrywomen still go and fight our wars for us? It must, I feel, be tied more to the Sermon on the Mount—in fact the totality of the Galilean’s message—than to American history.

I’m not a film critic, but were I, some brief mention of minor flaws would be mandatory. Would that Spike Lee had retained a firearms consultant to add verisimilitude to the battle scenes using M-16s and AK-47s. They were not used exclusively on “full-automatic” and when they were, they only fired three or four bursts, not 15 or 20. In fact, the AK-47 was specifically designed to require special, clumsy, movements to move it into “full mode.” Minor point and irrelevant, although one scene did picture the jamming of an M-16 which was a common problem.

Another amateurish point, Spike Lee has a bit of a tendency to violate what I am told is a trial-lawyers maxim: don’t overstate the obvious.

Still, a magnificent work, with a cast that deserves mentioning.

The Four Bloods:

Otis: (Clarke Peters), who quietly manages the operation.

Melvin (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.), a quiet hero.

Eddie (Norm Lewis) a failed businessman with Caucasian facial features and characterstics

Paul (Delroy Lindo) who wears a MAGA hat and suffers a mental collapse similar to Dobbs in “Treasure.”

Others:

David (Jonathan Majors), Paul’s estranged son, who forces his way into the adventure

Tiên (Lê Y Lan), a Vietnamese woman with whom Otis had a child (Sandy Huong Pham)

Desroches the French grifter (Jean Reno)

Hedy Bouvier (Mélanie Thierry) a French activist

Vinh (Johnny Tri Nguyen), a trustworthy guide, and of course:

Norman, a.k.a. “Stormin’ Norman” (Chadwick Boseman), the dead comrade.

Though I could never assimilate the feelings of African-American warriors, the film evoked a couple of memories. One concerned a non-com from Texas who briefed our detail before we went out. He delighted in taunting the sailors of color in our detachment by getting in their face and calling them “boy.” He went on an unauthorized jaunt into the jungle one day to “kill myself a deer,” and got lost. At the next assembly, we received an impassioned plea from our Executive Officer, a staff nerd who was supposed to spend his required military service running a PX in the Washington area but had obviously screwed up. He asked, “Who would join a patrol to go and look for our Texan?” After all, he was our shipmate.

It created the loudest ten minutes of silence I encountered during my entire tour.

The other was of the departure of our plane as we left the massive U.S. Air Base at Da Nang. Of the myriad Navy and Marine passengers, statistically slightly over 30 percent were African-American. Although they were eligible for the same GI benefits I would be, what good was a GI loan to a man who couldn’t purchase a home in my future neighborhood?

I’ll stop lest I begin to state the obvious. See the film. That’s all.