Mash-up

Yesterday I talked about how music can set the stage for me when I’m trying to understand a historical period. And, specifically, of course, when I’m trying to pull together the elements of a war.

For the last century, another medium of pop culture that can capture a society’s attitudes or experiences with a war has been film. I’ve written about this before, and shared some of the movies I think give particularly good pictures of various conflicts.

I was thinking about this, and then again thinking about the music from the Vietnam era, and Woodstock, and trying to remember whereI first saw the film about the rock festival—was it in Korea or in Virginia?

Must have been Virginia, at Fort Lee. The one I saw in the Quonset hut movie theatre at Camp Coiner (part of Yongsan Army Base in Seoul) was M*A*S*H. As I mentioned in my post about war movies, M*A*S*H was set in the Korean War, but it was really about Vietnam.

Anyhow, the thing I remember about that particular showing was that there was a joint passing from one direction in any given row, and a bottle passing from the other.

It was the 70s, man. You had to be there.