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Preface In the 20th century, eyewitness accounts of war began to merge with the imaginative re-creations projected on screens in movie theaters and, by the 1950s, on television. Long before smartphones, the popular imagination was refracted through screens and the stories seen there. Movies about wars became the way most of us remember those conflicts. As director Ingmar Bergman argued, “No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls” (Berger 1991). In worst cases, film can distort our memories. Essayist ­ Geoffrey O’Brien called the impressions of real events left by the fictionalization of the movies “a colony of barnacles clinging to the underside of your visual memory” (O’Brien 1995, 24). Korea has been called the forgotten war. One reason may be the relative paucity of notable Korean War (1950–1953) movies produced during the fighting and after the armistice (Jeansonne and Luhrssen 2014, 84–85). By contrast, the Vietnam War was never forgotten. The Vietnam War on Film examines how the war has been remembered—and, in one case, depicted during the time of the conflict—by Hollywood movies. It would have been a slender volume had it been published at the war’s end in 1975. Before then, John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968) was the only major motion picture to address a war that raged not only on the battlefield but also in public debates and protests across the United States. As the only explicitly prowar entry, The Green Berets is an outlier in this book, yet, as Hollywood’s first attempt at grappling with Vietnam, is a good place to begin. Arranged chronologically, each of the 10 chapters of The Vietnam War on Film is devoted to a particular feature-length film that depicts the war