Movie Review - The Quiet American

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I just saw 2002 version of The Quiet American with Brendan Fraser, Michael Caine, and Do Thi Hai Yen. It is as fine a movie as you will ever see - beautiful, suspenseful, and if you can view the ending without a sense of wistful sadness at the human condition, then your own humanity would need a tune-up.
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In 1950's French Indochina, a British reporter and an American medical aid director become friends, and not incidentally both love the same Vietnamese woman. She is the daughter of a college professor, but her parents are dead, and her precarious economic position makes her vulnerable.
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Between the French and the Communists, a third force emerges, mysteriously more powerful than anyone expected and moving the country toward a larger war. The third force turns out to have clandestine US support in one of our own country's darkest chapters. Violence escalates and the narrator, the British journalist, is forced to choose sides. The story is strangely prescient and caused quite a stir when it was written by Graham Greene back in the ‘50’s.
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Walking home from the movie, I saw innumerable signs that proclaimed "Support Our Troops." Once again we are in a war that grew inexorably from US support of uncontrollable insurgents - terrorists, really. We reap what we sow, over and over. Despite the sadness, the memorials, the endless neat rows of crosses at Arlington, the same mistakes again.
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Vietnam was the war of my childhood. That is, I grew up with the war on. Never as a child did I not watch the news and see helicopters over rice paddies, turn the pages in LIFE magazine and see the mixing of blood and mud in filthy bandages across the faces of soldiers who would never see anything, again.
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I remember the picture of Phan Thai Kim Phuc, the terrified little girl running naked toward the camera, horribly burned with napalm as US soldiers walked seemingly without concern in the background. (She's a dermatologist living in Paris now.)
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I was still a child when Lt. Calley ordered the massacre of Vietnamese villagers. When students were shot down at Kent State protesting the war. When a president was shot, an attorney general running for president, a civil rights leader, shot. The Watts ghetto exploded in flames. At the 1968 Democratic convention, police savagely beat protesters with nightsticks after gassing them and spraying them with mace. I was 11, looking at the grainy black & white pictures.
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Somewhere in the middle of all that, we landed on the moon.
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In the end, we simply left, our tails between our legs. The suicide rate today among Vietnam veterans is 25 times that of the general population. (The anti-war movement actually vilified soldiers. Can you imagine? They returned home from that crucible of misery only to be spat upon. The credibility of the Peace movement has not yet recovered.)
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Vietnam is a scar on the face of America, ugly, full of mangled nerves and harboring pathogens and fragments of metal.
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Communism collapsed under its own weight, and Ronald Reagan took credit. Since then, we've supported terrorists in Iran, Iraq, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Timor...
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Now we're in a war to stamp out terrorism, as it is defined now. And somewhere in some other country, we're supporting some 'group' that we think is on our side, that we think we can control.
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Go see the movie. Especially if you are under 40.