Tuesday, May 13, 2008
LtJohn Kerry is still trying to get the hang of maneuvering his patrol boat up river, but he keeps sinking his craft, or getting killed by snipers offshore. None of the vehicles handle very well, at least in LtJohn Kerry's hands, and the poor teammate who gets into a troop transport with him runs the risk of being trapped inside, when he tries to get it up a steep slope, and ends up turtling the unwieldy vehicle on the side of the hill.
At one point, LtJohn Kerry is attempting to fight his way into a temple complex, running point ahead of several of his Marines. But before he can reach the control point, he takes a bullet in the back.
"i killed john kerry -- woot!" one of his own teammates crows.
"but you fragged me," LtJohn Kerry protests.
"followed my gut"
"But I served in Nam!"
"so did my grandpa, he ain't running for pres"
In another skirmish, the Americans are being vastly outnumbered and outplayed; their strategies have failed. LtJohn Kerry advises his teammates to surrender, asking, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
"i live near beacon hill but i'll never vote for that ballmuncher kerry," a guy named Boston Pitbull says. "gw is the best man for the job."
"But I served in Nam," LtJohnKerry responds, as he creeps up on two Viet Cong "campers" -- players who stay out of the action, in a way that gains them an unfair advantage -- and shoots both from behind. "Doesn't that matter to you?"
"I saw kerry toss his medals in the oceans," seethes Pitball, "then he had some lackey go swimming to get them when everyone left.
"Ralph Nader 2004," someone named Nate interjects, as a MIG fighter screams overhead.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Judging by my small sample gleaned as LtJohn Kerry, I'd say the players of "Battlefield Vietnam" marginally skew, like the rest of the country, toward Bush. But as the game goes on, with all its high-speed mayhem, unleavened by any hint of quagmire, maybe even the Republican players will begin to get the subconscious impression that Bush missed out on all the fun. By choosing to spend his time during Nam endlessly circling over Houston, George W. Bush must seem like the ultimate camper. If Bush played "Battlefield Vietnam," you get the sense he'd be the guy who unaccountably ends up as team captain, and even if he's got a high-stakes strategy that might actually work, he pisses off so many people with bad communication and needlessly asinine maneuvers along the way that the victory you had right in your hands slips through your fingers.
A few days after I played "Battlefield Vietnam" with my Green Beret friend and I submitted my first draft of this review, the real world intervened in the most inconvenient way. In that draft, I explained how the game vividly demonstrated all the ways that Iraq bore little resemblance to Vietnam. I pointed out how the game made plain that jungle warfare with an enemy backed by tanks and air support and the supply lines of two enemy superpowers was hardly comparable to a numerically tiny insurgency armed only with light weapons in a desert nation.
Then the street-to-street fighting broke out. In Fallujah. Hawija. Najaf. Kufa. Baghdad. And making those points suddenly seemed rather beside the point. The maps set in Hue and Quang Tri, urban zones turned into rubble, where there's no such thing as winning clean, suddenly have relevant lessons of their own to impart. And for good or ill, many players of this game will find themselves open to them, in ways they wouldn't have been only weeks ago.
"The facts of the war were difficult for the public to understand," goes the on-screen text as Quang Tri map loads up, "and as such, they doubted the validity of the war."
In "Battlefield Vietnam," the Operation Game Warden map is set on the Mekong Delta, Kerry's old stomping grounds as a swift boat commander, and in it, the Viet Cong come equipped with B-40 rockets (though they're here listed by their alternate designation, the RPG-2). Though my own LtJohn Kerry never got the chance to do it, tens of thousands of players will end up reenacting something very much like the action that earned him a Silver Star, in coming months. And to the extent that "Battlefield Vietnam" sustains this sense-memory of Kerry, depicted not as grainy film stock, but as an immersive, interactive reality, you have to think its power will carry over for many of those who experience it. As something that keeps flickering in the back of their minds, as we close in on November, and the ballot booth.
And as it turns out, with things being what they are, the John Kerry that I want for president is actually a lot more like my computer game version than the one who's currently out there on the stump. I can't say I care much for his tortured, Möbius-strip statements on the Middle East and the terror war -- even when, as Iraq teeters once more on the brink, his opposite offers little more than the leadership of smirks. Neither do I care for the John Kerry who seems to think that striding through the jungles with an M-16 somehow qualifies him to make the tough decisions on tax cuts and healthcare (as some of the ads on his site imply). In the end, the only Kerry I want for president is the one who hunted down the V.C. guerrilla who was about to take out his swift boat crew with a B-40 rocket launcher and capped the bastard with that M-16. He served in-country despite his growing skepticism of the enterprise, and when the failures of foreign policy took the concrete form of a guy who was fixing to make things more miserable for his people than they'd ever imagined, he got out of the boat, and leaving all those misgivings of his behind, did what needed to be done.
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