by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Monday night, just before a rerun of the Frontline documentary comparing Hillary Clinton and Donald
Trump and depicting their backgrounds, PBS made one of the most unusual
programming decisions I can think of: they ran an hour-long documentary called USO
— For the Troops about the famous agency
that provides entertainment to U.S. servicemembers stationed overseas. Contrary
to common belief the “US” in the name “USO” does not stand for “United States.” The group’s full name is
“United Service Organization” and it was created by executive order by
President Franklin Roosevelt in February 1941. Before that each of the branches
of the U.S. military had its own service organization, and Roosevelt reasoned
that in the upcoming U.S. involvement in World War II (he had already pushed a
conscription bill through Congress in October 1940 — the first, but regrettably
not the last, in U.S. history — and as much as he was trying to play lip
service to America’s official isolationist policy he was looking for as many creative
ways to help the Allied war effort even before the Pearl Harbor attack
officially brought the U.S. into the war) they should be merged into one so
they could recruit bigger stars and provide higher-quality entertainment. Of
course no depiction of the USO would be complete without its greatest star, Bob
Hope, though I was surprised the filmmakers (they were unidentified on the PBS
Web page for this production and the film isn’t listed on imdb.com at all)
didn’t tell the marvelous story of how Hope got involved in “entertaining the
troops” in the first place. The U.S. put out a call to the major movie studios
to make films about the new draft law, and Paramount, Universal and 20th
Century-Fox all rose to the bait and made comedies about unlikely soldiers
finding themselves in the service and having to learn what military service was
about in a hurry.
Universal made Buck Privates, which made overnight movie stars of its leads, Bud
Abbott and Lou Costello. 20th Century-Fox, having just lured Laurel
and Hardy away from their long-time contract with Hal Roach, put them in a
script called Great Guns which
was a knockoff of Buck Privates.
Paramount put Bob Hope into a service comedy called Caught in the
Draft, and as part of the promotion for the
film they booked Hope to perform live at two military bases, including Fort Ord
near Monterey, California. As things turned out, Hope enjoyed performing for
servicemembers at military bases so much, he wanted to do more of it — and the
fledgling USO was all too glad to recruit him. Hope would literally entertain the troops in every war the U.S. fought
until the end of his life — his last stand was in Kuwait performing for the
troops of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. There are brief, tantalizing clips of
the World War II-era USO shows, including one of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra
together — Bing is shown with a strikingly receding hairline; he developed male
pattern baldness relatively early but wore a toupee for his stateside
appearances, though when he went on tour with the USO he showed up with his
hair au naturel — and one we’d
seen before of Hope joking that the Nazis were finding out “Crimea doesn’t pay”
(a joke someone could probably use now about President-Elect Trump’s good buddy, Russian President Vladimir
Putin!). President Harry Truman mothballed the USO in 1947 but brought it back
to life three years later when the U.S. got involved in the Korean War, and
there are some tantalizing clips of the Hope troupe performing in that conflict, including shots of Marilyn Monroe and
Jayne Mansfield and Hope giving one of his best lines for the USO: “There’s so
much mud here it’s the first time the ground has put in for a transfer.”
Then
there was the U.S. war in Viet Nam, the insane escalation, the sense that nobody involved in the war — including the “grunts”
themselves — knew what it was all about or why they were there, and (one of the
most shameful pages of the antiwar movement) the attacks on returning
servicemembers when they got back, including spitting on them, calling them
baby-killers and otherwise turning our dissatisfaction with the policy on the
poor grunts who’d carried it out. The USO — For the Troops documentary claims that Hope carefully avoided any
lines in his routine that seemed either to endorse or condemn the war or the
protesters against it, but that’s not true; watching the Bob Hope
Military Christmas Special from 1967,
filmed at his Viet Nam tour that year and featuring Raquel Welch, Barbara
McNair, Elaine Dunn, Madeleine Hartog-Bell (Miss World, from Peru), Phil Crosby
(one of Bing’s sons), Earl Wilson, and Les Brown and his Band of Renown, I
wrote, “[W]hat’s most fascinating about it is the extent to which it dramatizes
the unspoken (and sometimes quite loudly spoken) conflict between the mainstream
culture and the counter-culture of the time — between the so-called ‘silent
majority’ who still believed in Viet Nam and the fight against the implacable
global enemy, Godless Communism … and the hippies, the free-lovers and the
political activists who were marching in the streets against the war and trying
to figure out how to stop the juggernaut of American capitalist imperialism in
a war that, even by its own standards, was silly. … The contrast between the
two wings of American society in the 1960’s couldn’t be more obvious in the Bob
Hope Military Christmas Special, less from
the few nasty jokes about ‘peaceniks’ than simply from the clean, well-scrubbed
(or as well-scrubbed as possible given that they were watching these shows in
between battles), short-haired, clean-shaven faces in Hope’s audience and the
shaggy, long-haired, colorfully dressed hippies and protesters back home; the
version of Viet Nam we see here is emphatically not the nightmare of films like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse
Now, with its soldiers growing out their
hair, partaking of the plentifully available local marijuana and heroin and
listening to the Doors at their
most apocalyptic!” (The show was formerly available on archive.org but appears
to be off the site now.)
t’s also amusing to note that the service crowds seen
in the Hope specials are almost all male and almost all white —though Hope,
despite his conservatism in other areas, was anti-racist before anti-racism was
cool and made sure to include talented Black performers in his shows (one, a
quite good tap dancer, is interviewed here). Participation in the USO during
the Viet Nam era itself became seen as a public statement of support for the
war — “You wouldn’t have seen Bob Dylan or Joan Baez,” the show’s narrator said
— and indeed Jane Fonda and her then-partner Donald Sutherland organized their
own shows for the troops, FTA (which was variously said to stand for “Free the
Army” or “Fuck the Army”), which were held off bases and offered troops a
considerably edgier and more openly anti-war entertainment than the USO. This
documentary mixes the historical footage with a modern-day USO tour headlined
by country singer Craig Morgan, a former servicemember who remembers being at
the receiving end of USO shows himself before he left the military, established
a career as a country singer and volunteered to head a USO tour. The show also
depicts how much more the USO does these days than just give shows, including
helping servicemembers adjust to civilian life and offering services to
servicemembers’ kids (including a Sesame Street-themed show for them). On the USO Web site, https://www.uso.org/stories/300-country-music-star-craig-morgan-releases-video-for-new-single-via-uso-social-media,
Morgan offered a video for a song called “I’ll Be Home Soon” that he recorded
and released on an album called A Whole Lot More to Me just before he went on his USO tour, and though it
may seem a bit tacky that he timed his USO tour to promote his album, he plays
the song at the end of USO — For the Troops and it’s actually quite good, and appropriate fare
for a bunch of guys (and, this being today’s all-volunteer all-gender
all-colors Army, not all guys either!) off fighting a war in a benighted slice
of desert with little or no idea of why they’re there or when (or even if) they might be coming home.
