The Green Berets (1968) on Netflix
Reporter George Beckworth goes to South Vietnam to judge the war for himself and joins Colonel Mike Kirby's Special Forces camp. There a war orphan, Ham Chuck, attaches himself to Sgt. Petersen.
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Trailer
Plot summary
At Fort Bragg, reporter George Beckworth attends a Special Forces briefing on American involvement in Vietnam and stays unconvinced of its value. When Colonel Mike Kirby asks whether he has ever been to Southeast Asia, Beckworth realizes his ignorance and decides to report from South Vietnam. Kirby takes two handpicked A-Teams to a base camp with South Vietnamese and Montagnard troops, and catches Sgt. Petersen scrounging from his supply depot, then adds him to the team. At the camp, Beckworth witnesses irrigation ditches, bandages and candy for children but remains skeptical. Petersen befriends Ham Chuck, a war orphan who lives at the camp with his dog, Jamoke. Captain Nim, the ARVN strike force leader, says a spy network operates inside the camp.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Green Berets (1968)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- George Takei was a regular on Star Trek when he joined the film's cast, and as a result he missed filming nearly a third of the episodes of season 2; his lines were rewritten for Pavel Chekov, and Walter Koenig, originally a rarely speaking background character, grew into one of the major Star Trek leads.
- So concerned was John Wayne by anti-war sentiment in the United States that he requested and obtained full military cooperation and materiel from President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Department of Defense; he bought the film rights to Robin Moore's book for $35,000 and 5% of undefined profits.
- Elmer Bernstein, a friend and frequent collaborator of John Wayne, turned down the scoring assignment because of his political beliefs; the producers then contacted Miklós Rózsa in Rome, who replied "I don't do Westerns" and was told "It's not a Western, it's an 'Eastern'".
- John F. Schultz, an extra who played both a U.S. soldier and a North Vietnamese Regular, recalled that the producers were going to feed the extras hamburgers and hotdogs while the main characters ate steak, until John Wayne said "we all get steak or nobody does".
- The film's large set-piece battle is loosely based on the Battle of Nam Dong of 5-6 July 1964, when a mixed force of Americans, Australians and South Vietnamese troops fought off a force three times its size for five hours near the Laotian border.
