Tuesday, May 13, 2008
"It's a beautiful game," my friend Jason observes. "The details are terrific." Jason and I are playing on opposite sides in the Khe San map, while providing color commentary over our cellphones. And he's right: While the graphics engine looks rather hoary, compared to a next-generation shooter like "Far Cry," the maps are rendered with elegant, painterly care. Especially in the lush jungle and river terrain, with misty valleys in the distance, and ruined temples in the hills far ahead. If it weren't for all the bloodshed and screaming, the graphics would actually be rather soothing -- sort of like how John Kerry described the countryside, writing in his journal from the deck of his gunboat: "Simplicity characterizes everything around you and because of this an unassuming peace envelopes the fatigue."
At the moment, though, Jason is too busy barreling down on me in a Sheridan tank, to notice the unassuming peace. Since I'm Viet Cong for this round, I lob three grenades at him, and duck behind a corner. They hit their mark, and Jason curses, as his tank goes up in flames.
"I'm coming after you," he drawls into my earpiece, laughing, "and payback's a bitch."
The surrealism of the moment hits me, the moment I kill him, because some of the last guys to fight Jason ended up dead outside an Afghan village. As a Green Beret captain with Fifth Special Forces group, Jason Amerine led Hamid Karzai and his freedom fighters right into Kandahar, swatting the odd Taliban convoy out of the way. Right now, though, his combat mission involves chasing down a Bay Area geek who's hiding behind a weedy berm in the burnt-out city of Quang Tri.
While we exchange shots, I ask Jason if his training in the military has any relation to what we're playing now.
"No," he says, as he pops into an F-4 to launch a strafing run. "[It's] too simplistic. It's so arcade-ish, I don't feel there's a whole lot of accuracy to anything you do." Jason's talking to me from his apartment near the West Point Military Academy, in New York, where he now teaches international relations. "There's really no subtlety," he continues, while trying to wing the V.C. who is comically running and jumping in circles around him. "This is one of those brute force and ignorance kind of games."
After a few rounds of combat and 24 hours of offline R&R, Jason tells me he's pinned his finger on the arcade quality of "Battlefield Vietnam."
"I concluded it had to do with the movement of individual soldiers in the game ... the movement was so sped up, it didn't seem like aiming mattered at all; you just had to aim in their general direction and hop around like crazy, like it was 'Donkey Kong.'" This in contrast to the hyper-real graphics, and the game's soundtrack. "I really liked the music," he adds. "[It's] one of the best games audio-wise I've played in a long time."
Classic '60s pop songs, from Jefferson Airplane, Creedence, and other summer of love stalwarts, are constantly pouring out of vehicle radios and base camp loudspeakers. Like the "Grand Theft Auto" games that evidently inspired it, the overall effect of this music is to create an aural soundscape that complements the on-screen action in interesting, discordant ways. (Dropping a barrage of napalm on the enemy takes on a kinky hue, when Edwin Starr and his backup singers keep huffing "War/ what is it good for?/ absolutely nothing/ say it again!" in the background.) For extra ambivalence, you sometimes get to hear the forced morale-boosting patter of a DJ based on Adrian Cronauer of "Good Morning Vietnam" fame, and even more effective, a loop of Viet Cong propaganda, blaring through tinny speakers that echo through the blasted streets of Quang Tri, delivered by a girl in heavily accented English. ("Imperialists made you fight this war, G.I. They lied to you, G.I. They have ordered you to die.")
This audio counterpoint enforces the intertext that introduces each map, providing a brief summary of the war's historical background. They read like excerpts from a bad college term paper, most times, but they also set up the ambiguities of the coming battle. They even lean a little left, politically, asserting that "The Indochina conflict was a struggle for the independence of a people ... " at one point, and "The once heroic and romantic views of war slowly became tainted by the black and white reality of it," for "until the '60s, war was a fight for good vs. evil ... that changed, and the enemy was not necessarily in the wrong."
Taken together, this must make "Battlefield Vietnam" the first multiplayer action title to evoke a genuine sense of irony and historical complexity. (And by acknowledging the painful ambiguities of the war, this effect goes a long way to minimize any taint of exploitation.) In gameplay, it also creates a kind of reward-punishment roller coaster effect that some of the best Hollywood movies on the war ply the audience with. In films like "Platoon" and "Apocalypse Now," you're allowed to enjoy the kick of intense action, but you always get snapped back to the cruel reality of the conflict.
Sly references to classic Vietnam movies abound in the game -- as in Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket," the soundtrack comes with Trashmen's "Surfer Bird," and as in Coppola's film, with Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" -- but it's the manipulation of expectations that "Battlefield Vietnam" has most in common with its Hollywood predecessors.
As a hardcore gamer in his off-duty hours, Jason tells me he's more a fan of "Rainbow Six" and "America's Army" for realism in multiplayer combat. But "Battlefield Vietnam" is set in a war that has haunted the U.S. military for decades, and numerous lessons at West Point are devoted to learning from its failures -- and transcending them, with any luck. ("We've finally gotten past that whole Vietnam thing," one high-ranking officer told me with satisfaction last year, shortly after the M1s came rolling into Baghdad -- but before the brutal slog toward real peace began.)
According to Amerine, the game manages to convey some of these educational bullet points, but decisively fails, on others.
"One of the big lessons of Vietnam was that air power will only get you so far," he says. "It was a revolution in terms of air power [but] in an insurgency, such air power isn't everything, and won't win you the day. [In] this game, to its credit, you can have a lot of fun flying copters and jets, but to capture points, you have to be on the ground. The air power is a support tool, but it comes down to being on the ground."
But while Viet Cong players can plant pungi sticks and dig holes that become instant, V.C. tunnel spawn points, the unrelentingly fast-paced combat loses something, in the translation.
"[I]t's a shame they didn't capture some of the subtlety of a guerrilla war and an insurgency," Jason tells me. The game also "misses the subtlety of hearts and minds ... It would have been nice to have had tiny pockets of villages with civilians walking around [that have to be avoided]. The influence of civilians on the battlefield was huge. It particularly came to the forefront because the media was there showing what was happening in these villages. That was definitely a huge part of a stigma to the conflict."
As for what lessons of Vietnam can tell us about Iraq, Amerine does not deign to comment, and despite my pleading, refuses to be drawn into the quagmire of discussing Kerry's career in Vietnam, or his presidential campaign. "As a military officer," Jason tells me, "my duty is to carry out the orders of the commander in chief, and to me, once the man is elected, I give him my full respect and undying service and loyalty. So I just don't become involved in [talking about] the election." He chuckles. "But nice try."
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