"Da 5 Bloods:" Spike Lee and the Black Vietnam Experience (Keppler)

     I have been looking for an excuse to carve out two and a half hours to watch Spike Lee’s 2020 Vietnam War drama, Da 5 Bloods, and this is the perfect one. The experience of the white Vietnam War veteran has been the subject of significant cinematic exploration, including major films such as Apocalypse Now, Born on the 4th of July, In Country, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and The Deer Hunter, to name but a few. Few, if any, major motion pictures have intentionally and specifically addressed the Black experience in and after Vietnam, despite the fact that, as noted by the film, they comprised 31% of the ground troops, while simultaneously making up only 11% of the total American population. The film uses these statistics to great effect, to highlight the inequities of the Black experience both on the home front and while fighting what the characters deem an “immoral war.”

    In many respects the film is a traditional one, exploring the lasting and complex connections made between soldiers who share similar experience and trauma, fraught father-son relationships caused by the aftershocks of guilt and terror, the lingering emotional impacts of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and even including a treasure hunt for gold that went missing after a CIA plane crashed in the deep Vietnam jungle. The film follows four Vietnam War veterans who return “in country” decades later to retrieve the body of their fallen leader, “Stormin’ Norman” (powerfully played by Chadwick Boseman in his final role before succumbing to colon cancer) and to collect the aforementioned gold which they discovered and buried to collect at a later date. Incidentally, the gold was originally intended to be paid to Vietnamese collaborators, but the plane crash derailed these plans. A stark thematic juxtaposition is drawn here between the United States government’s treatment of Vietnamese citizens who help it achieve its aims and the Black soldiers who literally put their lives on the line without commendation, recognition, or compensation. The group, who have named themselves “Da 5 Bloods,” claim the gold as their own, and at the behest of their charismatic leader “Stormin’ Norman” intend to redistribute the wealth to the “Cause” as reparations. I don’t want to spoil too much here, but Norman is killed, the gold is misplaced, and the remaining Bloods return much later with their own personal designs on the money.

    Lee masterfully interweaves actual and recreated footage of the war to underscore the significance of Black involvement in the war, including a poignant testimony to Martin Olive, who was the war’s first Black Medal of Honor recipient after saving his squad from certain death by falling on a live grenade, and a painful moment where the Bloods learn of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. by a white man, and to highlight the war’s grotesqueness, including horrific images of the My Lai Massacre, “Napalm Girl,” and the execution of the Viet Cong prisoner.

 

Martin Olive

    A moment that stood out to me most viscerally was Lee’s use of Muhammad Ali’s compelling refusal to be inducted into the United States Air Force to begin the film. Ali, and by extension, Lee draws a parallel between the treatment of the Vietnamese and the Black population at the hands of the government. Ali famously had “no quarrel with the Vietcong,” when he was being harassed, exploited, and mistreated in his own hometown of Louisville. His refusal to participate in the war against the Vietnamese cost him a great deal, resulting in both a criminal prosecution and a boxing ban, but highlighted the inequities of the Black experience on the American home front and overseas.

            This is, I believe, Lee’s overarching purpose - to recognize the manifold contributions of Black soldiers to a country that after all of this time still does not reciprocate, to acknowledge the cost to the individual and collective of making those contributions, and to agitate for ongoing change. Again, I want to avoid spoilers, but, as it turns out, reparations can be used to advance causes that linger even still today.

 

Langmann, Brady. “Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods Honors the Real Black Soldiers Who Died in Vietnam.” Esquire, June 12, 2020, https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a32837667/da-5-bloods-spike-lee-true-story-milton-olive-james-anderson/.

 “Muhammad Ali Refuses the Vietnam War Draft.” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrRvPMefaAc&t=13s.