Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн

90 страница из 91

Southeast Asia had, of course, been much on the minds of young surfers throughout the second half of the 1960s. With the United States enmeshed in a brutal counterrevolution in Vietnam, millions of young men in the United States and Australia—the world’s twin centers of global surf culture—found themselves confronting the possibility of military conscription. Filmgoers today can tell you all about surfing and the Vietnam War. After all, they have seen Apocalypse Now (1979). In the film, Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, memorably played by Robert Duvall, calls for the destruction of a coastal Vietnamese village so that he and his men can surf a nearby break. They do so amid enemy fire. “If I say it’s safe to surf this beach, captain, it’s safe to surf this beach,” Duvall shouts at a doubting member of his unit. It was during this sequence, probably the film’s best remembered, that the famous lines “Charlie don’t surf” and “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” were uttered.

FIGURE 8. Surfing during the Vietnam War was not just a figment of Hollywood’s imagination. It was in fact a notable feature of the U.S. military’s rest-and-recuperation circuit. The military even sponsored surfing contests. In this photograph, several competitors exit the water at a contest in Chu Lai in September 1966. Credit: Photograph of Captain Rodney Bothelo, Elli Vade Bon Cowur, Robert D. Brinkley, Tim A. Crowder, and Steven C. Richardson, September 26, 1966, ARC ID 532396, Record Group 127, Still Picture Records Section, Special Media Archives Services Division, National Archives II, College Park, Mary land.