THE HISTORY OF GREEN BERET
“The war’s not over until the last man comes home.” That’s the tagline to the 1984 movie Missing In Action, in which professional beard Chuck Norris plays a US colonel who returns to Vietnam to rescue his captured comrades. The film was inspired by the popular belief that there were still thousands of captives being held in camps in southeast Asia years after the end of the Vietnam War. This notion is also explored in the film Uncommon Valor (1983) and exploited in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), where the cartoon-like John Rambo uses a bazooka to bust prisoners out of bamboo cages in Cambodia.
The massive popularity of such fare in the mid-Eighties, driven by the Cold War angst and anti-communist sentiment of the time, has since being dubbed ‘POW-sploitation’. And it wasn’t just a Hollywood fad, as videogames also got in on the act. Konami’s did it better and more cynically than most. You play as a special forces operative sent deep behind enemy lines to liberate POWs. The setting isn’t the hot tropical jungles seen in the movies, but rather the frozen wastes of what appear to be Siberia – a location presumably chosen due to long-standing claims that US captives were taken to Soviet labour camps. As such, standing between you and the prisoners is an army of overcoat-wearing Russians who want to stab,
