Today, Thursday November 11th, 2021. I'm going to change topics.
Veterans Day never really meant anything to me when I was younger. I was lucky that none of my immediate family ever experienced the hell of war. My uncle died in Iwo Jima, but I had never met him. My two brothers had been too young to be drafted during the Vietnam War. My father served in WWII and was stationed in the South Pacific. He and his buddies ran the Armed Forces Radio. Luckily, he came home without battle scars and without PTSD. After the war, he married my mom, bought a house in the San Fernando Valley, started a family, and forgot about the war. He was never ‘in the shit’ as those who have experienced battle will say.
I was a hippie and a peacenik. I protested against the Vietnam war in my 20’s. In the early 2000s, when Craig and I reconnected, one of the first things he told me about was how his close high school friend Bill Perkins had died at the age of 20 in Vietnam. Operation Medina was a horrible battle that lasted two nights in which the Marines were outnumbered two to one. None of them had expected to come out of it alive.
To learn more:
"Cameras, Combat, and Courage" by Dan Brookes
"Lions of Medina: The Marines of Charlie Company" by Doyle Glass
Craig told me he wanted to make a documentary about Bill. My first thought was “Good luck!”. Having been in the film and television business, I knew how difficult and expensive it was to make a film, but Craig was determined. He had become a war expert, but I told him I wanted nothing to do with war. I didn't want to learn about it, and I didn't want to study it because I believed in peace.
He said, “You can't fight for peace unless you learn about war.”
So, we began our journey to learn what happened to Bill on that fateful day, October 12, 1967 in the Hai Lang forest of Vietnam and make the documentary. We found Bill’s 16mm footage and still photographs in the National Archives in Washington DC. We learned that Bill had received our nation’s highest award for valor. To this day, Bill Perkins is the only combat photographer in our nation's history to receive the Medal of Honor.
We contacted the survivors of Operation Medina and were invited to their reunion in Washington, D.C. With my experience in film crews, we hired a cres. We flew with our director of photography to Washington, D.C. to meet the men of Company C. The rest of the crew, friends of the director of photography, came in from Boston where they had all gone to college together majoring in film studies. The young Boston crew rented a van to bring all the equipment down and we met for the first time at the hotel.
We had reserved a large conference room in the hotel where everyone was staying, but when we went down to start setting up, the group currently renting the room was running late. We had only three hours to film the Marines with more than an hour to set up the lighting, cameras, and camera track. Craig told me to get all the Marines together, go to the bar opposite the conference room and buy them all a round of drinks to make sure they didn’t leave. Thankfully, there was a bar right there and most Marines love to drink or we may have lost half of them to other activities. Ninety minutes and multiple rounds of drinks later, we were finally ready to greet the Marines and seat them in their assigned seats on a raked stage with a movie screen before them.
Our first objective was to film the reactions of the Marines together watching the last footage that Bill had shot before he died when he jumped on a hand grenade and saved the lives of his comrades. That final footage was miraculously salvaged out of a blow-up pile after the battle ended. A medic had just happened to be walking by when he saw a backpack with a canister open and 16mm film spilling out. The medic picked it up and took it back to headquarters and from there, it ended up in the National Archives. The Marines had never seen this 16mm footage before.
We started filming, and their reactions were of disbelief. “Look at how young we look!”, “Hey, there’s Robbie, remember how he always made fun of your accent!”, “Oh, I remember crossing that river! It was really deep, and me, short-snort, I was on my tiptoes holding my rifle with about sixty pounds of gear on my back. I thought I was going to drown for sure!” Marines, now in their 60’s and 70’s had tears rolling down their cheeks. Then we interviewed them about that horrific 36-hour battle. Although difficult, they opened up and shared their nightmare with us. The next day, we filmed at the Marine Corps Museum where Bill’s Bell & Howell Eyemo camera was on display. He was holding the camera when he jumped on the North Vietnamese Army hand grenade. The camera was shot through with shrapnel holes.
Friday night, there was a party in one of the ballrooms with an open bar and two of the guys had brought homemade moonshine. I took one sip and thought I was on psychedelics. That night changed my life forever when I heard their stories. Craig was right, you can’t fight for peace until you learn about war. One guy shared how his squad of nine men were walking down this path in the jungle always on the lookout for trip wires. The enemy would string a fine wire across a foot path that, if touched, would trigger a buried hand grenade to go off. As they were walking, suddenly everyone heard a click, and the point person froze. He looked back at the men, and everyone knew that he had hit a trip wire and he was a goner. A second later, the grenade exploded. The point person was gone, except for his legs which were still standing in their boots. A scene no human should have to witness in their lifetime.
Another guy in his late 60’s, a buttoned-up insurance salesman, pretty drunk at that point, suddenly broke down and started sobbing. After forty years, he said started having PTSD. He had been able to stuff it down all this time until recently. He broke down and confided in us that his wife had left him, he had lost his job of thirty years and was completely alone. War is truly hell on earth.
A grand piano was in the room, so halfway through the night, Craig sat down and started playing. He took song requests from the 1950’s all the way through the ‘90’s and we sang until 3am. Another Marine sang background harmonies with me, and we danced the Temptations walk. The guys kept buying Craig drinks, but he never liked alcohol and by the end of the night, there were thirty assorted drinks lined up behind the piano.
The final day we had planned to film at the Vietnam Memorial, but things were not going as planned. I had secured the necessary location permits from the U.S. National Park Service to film, but the backpack harness for the steady cam had not arrived and was still sitting at the airport. While they were shooting at the Marine Corps Museum, I went back to the airport. I had a hard time finding the commercial freight area, but finally, I had the equipment in my hands. Our shoot was taking place shortly after 9-11 and security was extremely tight. Alone, without any baggage, not looking at all like a passenger and carrying this large non-descript cardboard box, I expected to be stopped as a terrorist. But, no…I walked through the terminal without any problem.
Our shoot at the Vietnam Memorial was planned at dawn. We found parking places for our rental van and two cars on 21st Street at the corner of Constitution Avenue. It was dark and silent, with no people and no traffic. We started loading up the equipment into rolling bins with metal wheels and started across Constitution Avenue to the National Mall. To our left, shone the Capitol Building and to our right, the Lincoln Memorial. The rolling bins were making a loud obnoxious racket grating metal on the cement pavement. We were a motley crew, four young independent filmmakers and two old hippies leading the charge. We expected to be stopped at any moment by the police to ask who we were and what we were doing. but no one stopped us or even asked for our permit. So much for security in our nation’s capital!
We spent most of the morning filming different locations at and around the memorial. About 11am, one of the park rangers came towards us. He looked like trouble. Craig told the crew to keep on shooting while he spoke to this gentleman. I showed him our permit, but he told us that we did not have clearance to shoot closer than 30 feet from the memorial wall and that we would have to stop filming immediately. Luckily, we kept him busy just long enough for the crew to get the final shot, an awesome and apparently, illegal fly-by of the wall that dissolves into Bill’s name engraved into it. It was brilliant.
With the wrap of filming, Grace and I went back to our hotel room to prepare for the trip home the next morning. We had an 11:32 am flight out of Dulles Airport. Meanwhile, the crew and DP went out on the town. The next morning, my alarm went off at 6am and I called over to the crew’s room to make sure the four of them were up and getting ready to check out. The DP tells me that one of the crew members Danny had gotten way too drunk, got lost and didn’t get back to the hotel room until around 4am. He said he had peed in the bed, and he couldn’t get him to wake up. I went over to their room to try to get them straightened out. Strangely, propped up outside the door, there was a car tire. Apparently, Danny thought it would be a nice addition to the décor. I opened the door, and the stench made me gag. It took another ten minutes to get Danny to wake up.
Meanwhile the clock was ticking—we still had to return the van downtown before getting to the airport for the flight home. Finally, we get everyone showered and checked out of the hotel. The car rental location was packed with people. We stood in line for at least twenty minutes, and I thought my head was going to explode as I pondered what would happen if we missed our flight. With the van returned, we said goodbye to the two Boston crew members and grabbed a cab to the airport. I had no idea Dulles Airport was so huge with six terminals and 135 gates! Of course, our gate was the last gate at the terminal furthest away. We had to take a very strange people-mover across the tarmac—a waiting room on wheels that moved as slow as a tank and stopped frequently to let planes cross its path. Finally, we arrived at our gate. Luckily, the plane was boarding fifteen minutes late and we made it.
Back home, we still had individual interviews to shoot and some additional filming to do around the Valley. We interviewed Bill’s father here at the house and we flew in a former Marine who had been next to Bill that fateful night. Then the long, slow process of editing began. Craig and I spent endless hours going over the ‘dailies’, the raw footage deciding which takes to use and establishing a script. We hired an Emmy-winning editor as our editor.
We wanted a well-known actor who had been in the military to read the Medal of Honor citation. Our first choice was Dennis Franz from the show “NYPD Blue”. I had a connection to him, and we were invited to a holiday Christmas party that he was going to attend. Sure enough, he was there and after talking to him about the story, he agreed to record the narration. He asked me to contact his publicist to set it up. A few weeks later, we were invited to the 20th Century Fox Studios where we met Mr. Franz in his comfy trailer. He walked us over to the famous soundstage where they recorded the voices for the “The Simpsons”. The engineer set up the tape and Mr. Franz asked, “How do you want me to read this?” Craig was stunned. This great actor was asking him how he wanted him to read. Mr. Franz did it in one take.
Craig had written two songs for the film “Wings” and “Another Place, Another Time” which we used over the end credits. Seven months and countless hours of editing later, the documentary “Above and Beyond: The Story of Cpl. William T. Perkins, Jr. USMC” was completed. The 30-minute documentary aired on PBS for several years and is now available free of charge on YouTube.
Making the documentary changed my life forever. The men of Company C will always be in our hearts. I fight even harder now for peace in the world. This Veterans Day, for the first time in over 20 years, the United States is not at war. Today, I hope that you will take a moment to reach out to veterans and ask them to tell their stories. It is not easy for us or for them to share these horrible hellish stories, but I truly believe that it is in telling these stories of war that we can heal and hopefully, learn that war is not the answer.