| Article Published: Sunday, April 03, 2005 | ||||||||||||
| Framing
memories A Grand Junction filmmaker gleans veterans' indelible moments for his third documentary about WWII.
He has white hair. So many of them do. Sitting in a tan recliner, Clyde Hogue recounts horrific events with an almost out-of-body precision. "After a little while, the commander again told me I have to move out. I called back and said, 'I can't.' He said, 'Why?' "I said, 'I'll run over soldiers.' They were lying everywhere. And he said, 'Well, we have to move."' Hogue looks through his lightly tinted glasses to another place, another time. "I had to give that an awful thought," he tells the director videotaping him. Then he begins to shake his head. Not emphatically. He just starts to shake it back and forth, as if saying no gently but over and over again. "There's no worse thing in the world a man has to do. ... I decided if I got to run over anybody then I'm gonna go over their legs."
In Larry Cappetto's DVD documentary series "Lest They Be Forgotten," Hogue is not left alone with his D-Day memories. A string of aging men - some spry, a few breathing from oxygen tubes - sit in their homes, on their sofas or La-Z-Boys, recounting their combat experiences. Much like Tom Brokaw and "Saving Private Ryan" director Steven Spielberg, Grand Junction filmmaker Cappetto sees a generation deserving of tribute and of gratitude in the men and women he has interviewed for his project. In May, the wiry 47-year-old will take the third chapter of "Lest They Be Forgotten" to the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, Calif., for its premiere. May 8 marks the 60th anniversary of V-E Day. The first two films focused on D-Day - June 6, 1944. This latest effort looks at the Marines who stormed the tiny Pacific island of Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945. It was a battle likened by one muscularly poetic historian to "throwing human flesh against reinforced concrete." By the month-long campaign's end, nearly 7,000 Americans had died and 26,000 were wounded. The 22,000 Japanese defenders died almost to a man. Cappetto's calling This do-it-yourself documentarian's series could be seen as just one more example of the power that the "Greatest Generation" - so christened by Brokaw - exerts on our popular imagination. As decades pass and more politically and strategically complex wars confound us, World War II offers a clarity of purpose that stands for what America could - and should - be. But the project, which now takes up 90 percent of Cappetto's time, is more like a calling - and an expensive one. He has sunk up to $75,000 of his own money into it. There is little flash to Cappetto's style. And while his usual approach - a parade of talking heads - has fallen out of favor, his march of interviewees has a power beyond film-school aesthetics.
"Machine-gun fire looked like rain." "The water was pink." "The beaches were red." "The beach was pretty loaded with bodies." More than a few veterans describe the fallen as piled on the shore "like stacked cords of firewood." Recollections on the trailer for the Iwo Jima film - still in production - are even more disturbing, more vivid. Yet graphic as the stories are, Cappetto and his subjects avoid creating what has come to be called "combat porn." Their catharsis trumps our voyeurism. "The first question I usually ask is where were you the night before the landing," said Cappetto, sitting in his modest home office from which he operates an independent video production company. "I always like to know the mood of the troops: 18 years old, you might die tomorrow, what are you thinking about?" His questioning gets more precise. By avoiding abstract questions in favor of the details of a 24- to 48-hour time frame, Cappetto seems to aid and ease his vets' memories. "Someone will tell me their story in two minutes and we'll back it up. What was it like getting into the landing craft? Going down the nets with the pack on your back? I get that progression into shore. Now, what did you start to see? What were you feeling? What did it feel like when they were shooting at you? "One guy didn't remember going to the bathroom or eating in 36 days," says Cappetto. "I thought that was kind of odd." But he has learned to spot a look in their eyes that means they are reliving it. "You can tell," he says. He has learned to back off, to circle around, to begin anew. Flood of subjects In 2003, a columnist for a Phoenix-area newspaper wrote a piece about a filmmaker searching for veterans of the U.S. assault on Omaha Beach. "Oh, my God, I had 100 phone calls," recalls Cappetto. "The article ran on Sunday morning. Seven-thirty in the morning, I pick up the phone and my very first veteran called me and said, 'My name is Jack Lindenman, and I landed on Omaha Beach,' and he started to cry.
They find Cappetto, decades their junior, a sympathetic ear. "Larry is so honest about what he is doing you can't help but like him and cooperate to the best of your ability," said Lewis Johnson, 82, by phone from his Lakewood home. He called the director after hearing him on the radio. On June 6, 1944, Johnson was a 20-year-old sailor dropping men from the 29th Infantry division of the 116th Regiment off the shores of France.
"I think most of us were that way. You go through hell like that, and the one thing you want to do is forget it when it's all over." Last April, Cappetto and Johnson journeyed to Normandy together. Cappetto plans to make a film about their trip called "Return to Normandy." Volume Two features some of that visit, including Johnson meeting German veteran Franz Gockel. Cappetto begins the second volume of "Lest They Be Forgotten" with Gockel's description of the D-Day invasion from his vantage point - a machine gun nest above the beach where the Army's First Infantry Division - the fabled Big Red One - landed. "I asked Franz, 'What did you think when he saw all those landing craft?"' Johnson says. "'I prayed to God,"' he answered through an interpreter. Gockel told Johnson that his lieutenant told his 22 machine gunners "to wait till they're knee-deep in water to open up." Johnson and Gockel were looking down on the beach. "He made a sweeping motion with his arm," says Johnson, a soft catch in his throat. "He said, 'We mowed them down."' Veteran father Larry Cappetto's father, Robert, was a veteran of another war, Korea. Hanging on the wall amid a framed drawing of Elvis, a NASCAR calendar and a number of photos of Cappetto and "his vets," is a photo of Robert Cappetto in uniform standing next to Larry's grandfather, Louis. Cappetto never got to put Robert in front of his videocam and hear his story the way he has the WWII vets. Robert Cappetto died of cirrhosis of the liver when he was 37. Larry was 10. Shortly after his death, his mother, Helen, moved Larry, Teri and John to Grand Junction. For a man driven by the issues of war, remembrance and forgetting, Cappetto doesn't recall much about his childhood. He remembers playing with toy soldiers. He remembers his first movie, "The Green Berets," which starred John Wayne as an Army colonel in Vietnam. "These veterans forget things that were hard," says Cappetto, pondering the ways his father's absence may figure into this labor of obsession. "I had a hard childhood because my father was an alcoholic," he says. "To this day I can't fall asleep unless everybody's asleep in the house. My mom used to take my dad to bed at 2 or 3 in the morning, and when he was in bed, I knew there'd be peace in the house." "He was such a puzzle to me," Helen Cappetto says of her son. He still can be. "Patriotism, I don't know where he got that," she says, sitting in the living room of her house, a little more than a mile from her son's home. "We never stressed that so much at home. We didn't put it down by any means. Maybe he picked it from school and took off from there." Larry, who has been sitting quietly, chimes in. "I think a lot of it has come forth from the project." Visiting those countless living rooms has transformed Cappetto. "I go into the homes of these men, and I get excited because I know in a few minutes I'm going to travel back in time 60 years," he says. "What I've done is come pretty close to being in combat without being in it. I'm not saying getting out and training with Marines and going to an actual war zone, but as far as a civilian, a filmmaker wanting to learn about history, wanting to allow these men an opportunity to tell their stories. "I've touched history." Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com . |
And
that's what a very young Hogue did with his tank in June 1944
on Omaha Beach. "I made sure I would be off of him before
I turned. Otherwise those tracks, those would tear him
up." Still shaking his head, but not the memory, he says,
"I ran over quite a few soldiers."
"I
think these men really sense the urgency of the timing. Many
of them are in their 80s; consequently they're opening
up," Cappetto said.