Rescue Dawn may distort history, but for a Hollywood production it has more than moments which do not. And the odds are it's been appreciated over the last half-decade for exactly that reason by Americans knowledgeable about the Vietnam War.
The movie stars Christian Bale and Steve Zahn as American warriors captured in Laos or northwestern South Vietnam in 1965, when according to the movie's pre-narrative, "few Americans thought the Vietnam War would become an all out war." I must have been one of those few, because I knew President Lyndon Johnson was fully committed to America's long-dead South Vietnamese puppet Diem's refusal to honor the Geneva Accords; and I sensed that America's buildup for (if not the actuality of) the bombing of North Vietnam, Operation Rolling Thunder, had begun.
Click here to read the Wiki entry about Operation Rolling Thunder:
The movie's first scenes take place aboard the U.S.S. Hornet (having survived WW II with laurels), in the Gulf of Tonkin, and the most cracking-wise loudmouth among the officer-pilots is a man with the soon-to-become-notorious moniker "Spook."
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