how did "we were soldiers" ever get made?

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Ted Striker
There's no anti-British theme in that movie it must not be a Mel Gibson movie

My 100% Irish co-worker would agree.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Straybow

Originally posted by MRT144
within the first 10 minutes theres so much that is pulled from today and put into the past. like white people who didnt know what "whites only" meant. or "i dont want to make orphans". people in 1964 didnt think like this or were ijgnorant of their own society!

Far from it. There were plenty of small towns in the north that never had any blacks, so the issues of Jim Crow laws would never even be raised. That's the idea here, that these were women from all walks of society cast together in a new environment where normally they would never mix.

Yes, and IIRC what happened in that scene really did happen, albeit I'm sure in a much different form than written and depicted in the film.

[Blaupanzer]

A lot of whites from the north and the west were genuinely surprised at how bad Jim Crow was in the south in the '60s. The draft showed it to them, as a lot of training bases were in the south. An active disinformation campaign against MLK by the FBI among others meant a lot of folks didn't believe him until white reporters from the notheast began exposing this on television. The woman's reaction is believable, whether or not it really happened.

[Straybow]

We could try to find the woman and tell her that she needs to confirm the story to a bunch of whiney slackers on an internet forum.

[Joseph]

Re: how did "we were soldiers" ever get made?

Originally posted by MRT144
within the first 10 minutes theres so much that is pulled from today and put into the past. like white people who didnt know what "whites only" meant. or "i dont want to make orphans". people in 1964 didnt think like this or were ijgnorant of their own society!

gibson better die!

Well first, this battle did not take place in 1964. I was in the Navy in 1964 and blacks sure as heII did not sleep topside while the rest of us sleep in our bunks.

In my part of the world, black sailors were just like me. When I was in Supply Div on my ship, my PO 2 was guess what Black. I got a long find with him.

[Vince278]

The navy was an environment where everyone was in close quarters. People had to work together. Even the navy in apartheid South Africa was integrated.

[Blaupanzer]

The services were all integrated by 1964. The woman's complaint, IIRC, was about the society around the base.

[Chemical Ollie]

I think "We were Soldiers" is an excellent and quite unbiased* modern war movie, up there among "Blackhawk Down" and a few others. And blood splattering on the camera lens is a SFX never seen before.

A war movie that gives me great expectations is "Stalingrad" by the same director as "Das Boot". A WW2 movie where the Germans speak German is always good. Has anyone seen it?

*A war movie made by one of the participating nations is never unbiased.

[Jon Miller]

I like my germans evil.

JM
(which goes good with them talking german)

[Chemical Ollie]

Wehrmacht is never evil, they're just ordinary guys caught in the middle. It's always SS that plays the evil part, even in German movies.

[Dis]

germans always will be evil.

[Chemical Ollie]

Germany still recalls Sweden being evil (from the 30-years war in the 1600's). German villages were completely annihilated, and not rebuilt for 1-200 years
Large agricultural areas were unused for centuries.

Let's blame it on the Evil Finns, they were the gunfodder part of the Swedish army back then.

[Dis]

weren't the French to blame for that war as well?

[Chemical Ollie]

The French blame all wars on the Germans

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Blaupanzer
The services were all integrated by 1964. The woman's complaint, IIRC, was about the society around the base.

The Air Force was racially integrated since its founding in 1947 (the same act that created it also created the Department of Defense and mandated racial integration among other things). The other services were a little slow to integrate (it took awhile for large numbers of other races to rise through the ranks presumably).
Integrating the sexes is a seperate issue and still a work in progress.