This is about the movie Hair, but I think it’s General Questions territory anyway.
I watched the movie for the first time the other day. At the end, George Berger wears Claude Bukowski’s uniform and takes his place for the head-count at Claude’s military base so that Claude can leave the base and party in the desert. Now, while Claude is away, his unit leaves for Vietnam. Berger follows reluctantly, and then there’s a cut to a white tombstone reading “George Berger Vietnam”.
Several questions arise:
Did units really leave for Vietnam on a notice of three minutes, like in the film?
What would have happened if George Berger would have told an officer the truth before leaving for Vietnam? Jail for him and Claude? At least it would get them away from Vietnam.
How could George Berger possibly die in Vietnam… under his own name? If they found out who he was, why was he kept there (in all fairness, he had been sent a draft notice but he hadn’t been through any training)? If they didn’t, why didn’t it say Claude Bukowski on that tombstone?
Well. I’ve never been in the military or seen ‘Hair’ but that’s not going to stop my from throwing out my WAG.
I’m guessing no. From what I understand, units went threw a cycle of training and deployment to the 'Nam. Even our rapid deployment forces don’t drop what they’re doing at a moments notice and jump on a ship or cargo transport.
Bukowski would be court martialled for being AWOL or for desertion. Berger I’m sure would also be arrested for something.
Maybe he managed to keep his charade up until he was killed, at which point they would put his real name on the toumbstone.
In any event, I am also under the impression that if there’s one thing the military is good at (other than kicking ass) it’s record keeping. I highly doubt that a person could trade places with someone and NO ONE would notice.
This military you speak of, the one that is so good at record keeping, did it not allow under-age young men to enlist and fight even though they used fake ID? Has this not happened in every single American war past and very likely in the current … whatever we’re calling it right now.
Is it not the case that veterans groups often advertise the fact that you can join them without fear of legal problems, even if you used fraud to enlist? Call your local VFW Hall. Go play some pinochle with the guys.
Another thing; I’ve never been in the military and am not 100% sure exactly what real life is like, but wouldn’t his superiors or other guys in his unit notice that he’s not who he says he is? These guys were supposed to train together for months, right? I doubt that he would have gotten away with it.
I don’t know. I just assumed that with computers and all it would be easy to check. But as Robbbbb pointed out, it’s one thing to sign up fraudulantly. It’s quite another to show up halfway through basic, swap places with one of the soldiers and pass yourself off as him. You get to know people when you train, eat, sleep and shit together. Imagine someone on your baseball team or dorm hall all of a sudden looks completely diferent. You wouldn’t notice?
Well, obviously it makes no kind of sense from a military or logical point of view. It looked like they were marching into the bellies of cargo planes, in full cargo gear, to go from the States to Nam, apparently straight out of basic training. However, it was a very effective scene in a movie.
As far as that goes, I doubt if draftees from Oklahoma had to go to New York City to be inducted. But what the heck – people don’t generally break into song and dance simultaneously, either. Musicals exist in their own world.
When Berger answers to Bukowski’s name, the guys standing next to Berger do look at him. Presumably they recognize that he is not Bukowski but don’t say anything, for whatever reason (perhaps under the “don’t volunteer for anything” rubric?) The guy who’s calling roll may or may not be the drill sergeant who’s trained them, but my impression (from hazy recollection) is that one guy called roll and a different guy was rousting them (“You don’t wanna go, I don’t wanna go, we all gotta go!”) and that neither of them may have had the time or inclination to spot that one guy out of a unit of what, 100?, looked unfamiliar.
Yes, moving a normal unit to another country (from normal garrison living) can take weeks of preparation. If they are just a bunch of boot camp graduates flying out to be assigned to a unit “in country”, it can take SUBSTANTIALLY less time, but without a doubt the guys would know more than 24 hours ahead of time, subject to the ever present changes that the military is famous for. I have not seen the movie or play, but I’d guess (1)Bukowski either knew he was leaving and bugged out, (2) FORGOT when he was leaving, or (3) had been on alert to go whenever the plane arrived, and having been waiting for a few days, figured it wouldn’t get there while he was out.
When Berger tries to get Bukowski to leave with him, Bukowski says the base is “on alert; they’re taking head counts all the time.” None of the officers and NCOs who interact with Berger-as-Bukowski seem to have ever encountered Bukowski before. There’s no indication in the movie that Bukowski knew exactly when he was scheduled to ship out or that he bugged out (in fact after the picnic he races back to the base and tries to locate Berger before Berger gets shipped out).
I believe this goes under dramatic license. Yes, the circumstances of Berger’s leaving were unrealistic, but it wasn’t supposed to be a factually accurate representation of military protocol. Rather, Berger and his extreme unpreparedness were supposed to represent the unreadiness of the grunts in general for war in Vietnam. I suppose you could also say that he represents American society itself at the beginning of the war, and that Americans were like Berger, stepping into the middle of something that they had no knowledge of. You could say that Berger represented America’s innocence, and that it – like Berger – died in Vietnam.
In other words, Berger’s accidental deployment was meant to be symbolic. At that point in the movie, considerations of plot were suspended to elaborate the theme, which is the same point that Rube was going for. That’s my take on the scene, anyway.
By the way, where does the infamous naked scene go in the musical? I always wondered about that after seeing the movie. Or am I getting Hair confused with something else?
Hell, when I was in my last week of basic training my drill sergeant still didn’t recognize my face. That’s why nametags are so helpful. Drill sergeants see about 120 new faces every 8 weeks (these days, back then it might have been 5 or so), and with everyone having a shaved head and wearing identical uniforms I can understand them not knowing Bukowski by anything other than “Private” or “Dirtball”.
His platoon, though, probably would have recognized the switch, but either it didn’t interest them, or they figured something was up and Berger was supposed to have been there all along (and Bukowski was trying to take his place from day 1). However, I would have had a big problem going in to combat with a guy that had never been trained.
Whole units do not deploy straight from basic training. They were being shipped off as replacements for dead or wounded soldiers in units that were already in Vietnam. Once they debarked overseas they would have been shipped off in small groups to the various units that needed live bodies. Since you’re just deploying a group of soldiers but not the equipment of a unit, this can happen very quickly. When I deployed to Saudi Arabia in 91, the total time from my stateside unit to a unit being formed in Dhahran was about 4 days, time enough to get to Ft. MacPherson, get a physical, immunized, fill out forms in case I didn’t come back, a little briefing, and off I went (I was deployed with 3 other guys from my unit, but not as a unit).
It’s quite possible that the military would never notice the switch in something as chaotic as the conflict in Vietnam. Only when they tried to notify his next of kin might the truth come out, especially if he was killed relatively early in his tour. I find it hard to believe he would be given a military burial, but perhaps they fudged some paperwork to make it happen. He still died for his country.
FWIW – cygnus’s SO was in the Army during the Vietnam war. His unit had been stationed in Germany - i.e., they were well beyond the basic training they received in the states and had been placed on some sort of regular duty there. After a number of months, they were mustered up (is that an appropriate verb?) from their regular “assignments” (sorry, you can tell I was NOT in the military) and put on a plane for Vietnam with much less than 24 hours notice. I don’t know the exact time frame, but from his description, it was not that much different from that particular scene in “Hair” – he says the sergeant (or whoever) in charge came into the barracks and told them to get their stuff together and fall out at a such-and-such a time, and next thing they knew they were all in a plane staring at each other with the magnitude of the situation abruptly becoming very real.
I’m not sure if it’s true that no one was sent to Vietnam straight out of basic training, but certainly soldiers did not always have much advance notice that they were shipping out from “peaceful” duty to active combat.
My take on it was that probably he piped up at some point and revealed who he was (wasn’t) but at that point in the war it was more important to have mass numbers of people rather than highly trained ones, or they made him learn the important stuff like how to load a gun on the plane on the way over.
My question (and this is obviously more IMHO/Cafe Society) was did he actually die fighting or was he found dead hiding behind a tree or trying to escape or something?
It doesn’t matter how he died. You can think he died saving several of his new buddies, or that he tripped and fell on a rock… the point is just that he’s another one for the body count.
The movie was hippie bullplop. The only scene I actually liked was the first time the hippies try to get onto the base and the sergeant at the gate tells them to get lost. This made a refreshing contrast to the upper-class twits who seemed utterly helpless and befuddled when the hippies crash (and trash) the dinner party earlier in the film.
When the MP (Donald Alsdurf, I believe) was telling the hippies to hit the road, he was neither confused by their way-outedness nor threatened by their free-spiritedness nor impressed by their let-it-all-hang-out-man-itude. He just didn’t have any patience for them at all. He’s the only respectable character in the whole movie.
Priceguy, he’s talking about the play. I’ve never seen it, but I gather there’s always a scene where several of the cast members are naked together – it got a lot of publicity in the sixties.
I understand that the movie imposes a narrative structure that didn’t exist in the play, so there might not be a point in the movie that exactly corresponds to where that scene would appear in the play.
