Thin Red Line fails to impress two vets

Long after the credits had rolled at the end of The Thin Red Line, Bud Beneke and Frank Perasso sat in the screening room, trying to figure out why the movie had left them so cold.

"A lot of that movie looked like Bougainville, like the jungle we had over there," said Perasso, 74, who fought with the Americal Division in the Pacific during World War II.

Beneke, an artilleryman who served in the Pacific from 1941 to '43, nodded, saying, "A lot of it brought back memories - like those mangrove swamps."

"It was pretty graphic in places," said Beneke, and Perasso said, "Yeah. It made me remember how scared I got before patrols, how you'd spend the night before writing letters, not knowing what would happen."

"But the movie was kind of tedious, in a way," Perasso said, and Beneke agreed. The two vets gave it four stars for its photography, but no more than two overall.

"I don't really think this is going to go over," said Perasso. Beneke added, "Guys collecting gold teeth out of the mouths of Japanese - I think that's going to be too much for general viewing."

And both men agreed the battle scenes were over the top.

"It seems like they were exaggerated - the ups and downs of it, the way men reacted," said Perasso. "You get a picture of the brutality, but I know my wife wouldn't want to watch it," Beneke said.

Beneke and Perasso, golfing buddies who live blocks apart in San Francisco, settled in to watch The Thin Red Line with an eye toward seeing their own war in the movie. They saw some of it, but only some.

The feeling of slaughter was true to the war, said Perasso, who remembered that in one battle on Bougainville "the Japanese attacked our line where it was three deep. I'm not sure of the final figures, but I heard they lost 16,000 to only 108 Americans."

Not many Japanese prisoners were taken, either, added Perasso - a theme that emerges in The Thin Red Line. "I think in one year we only took about 12 prisoners, and these guys were all in bad shape. A lot of them had malaria - no quinine."

The Thin Red Line is set on Guadalcanal in 1942-43, and the Americal Division fought there just before Perasso joined the outfit. He said he shared foxholes with men who had been at Guadalcanal, "and they all said it was pretty dicey. One guy, I remember, was real jumpy, really shook up at every sound he heard. I laughed at him. But I was just a youngster, 19 years old. I didn't know anything."

Beneke talked about an officer in his outfit "who lost so many guys he couldn't handle it anymore. They pulled him out of the line, put him in charge of maps at headquarters or something." He also remembered men receiving Dear John letters before going into a battle -- "it absolutely ruined this one guy's life."

There were different reactions to Dear John letters, added Beneke -- "One guy collected pictures of girlfriends from all the other guys in the unit and sent them back to his girl, saying, 'Pick out the one that's you and send back the others.'"< p> Perasso remembered the periodic firefights -- the death of a soldier who'd come into the company only the day before, the death of a sergeant who'd been trying to defuse a mine.

Both men were concerned about the way soldiers handled themselves on the screen.

"I don't think they used cover the way they should've," said Beneke. Perasso added, "That part where six of them are all bunched together coming up that hill, that was bad."

The movie "was kind of tedious to me," said Perasso. "I'd rather go to see a musical or a comedy, one of those whodunit comedies." He laughed to himself, saying, "But then I come from a different generation."