The other film often shown on Memorial Day was The Green Berets, where an aging John Wayne is seen emptying his M16 into hundreds of North Vietnamese rushing to overtake an American firebase during another civil war. Hai didn’t know it then, but with not enough Asians to fill the number of corpses the film demanded, white actors wore black makeup as yellowface during night battles, the crude paint streaked with sweat shimmering across the screen as they died, in comically exaggerated throes, piling in heaps around sandbags stacked about the base, shot from a distance that would hide their
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