336 WINTER WAR, THE [FInnIsH: TALVISOTA]
exercise of American imperialism. Indeed, the film’s right- wing pedigree was
amply demonstrated when President George W. Bush held a private screening of
We Were Soldiers at the White House on 26 February 2002 (three days before its
national release). In attendance were Moore, Galloway, Wallace, Gibson, and
other cast members, spouses, and studio executives, as were Vice President Dick
Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Advisor Condoleezza
Rice, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In all the patriotic hoopla, no
one seemed to notice the exquisite irony of the occasion. Whereas Moore, Galloway,
and Powell were genuine Vietnam War veterans (“heroes,” if you will), hawkish
ideologues Wallace, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld carefully avoided Vietnam, though
all of them could have served.Reel History Versus Real History
Although much of the relentless combat action depicted in the film is accurate in
broad terms, the decisive, culminating bayonet charge led by Lt. Col. Moore is a
total, absurd fabrication. In point of fact, the North Viet nam ese broke off the engage-
ment of their own accord but not before wiping out Moore’s sister battalion, the
2/7, at LZ Albany— a crushing American defeat expunged from the movie for obvi-
ous reasons. Historian Maurice Isserman plausibly suggests that the mythical
bayonet charge in We Were Soldiers was meant to evoke Gettysburg (1993): “Actor
Sam Elliott, who plays a tough and gravelly voiced master sergeant [Basil L. Plum-
ley] in We Were Soldiers, had played a tough and gravelly voiced cavalry officer [Brig-
adier General John Buford] in the earlier film. As a casting choice, Elliot’s presence
works at a subconscious level, and prob ably intentionally, to link the two films and
the battles they depict in the audience’s mind” (Isserman, 2002). Isserman goes
on to characterize We Were Soldiers as an “idealized, abstracted, and ultimately cyn-
ically manipulative fantasy of generic American heroism under fire.”WINTER WAR, THE [FINNISH: TALVISOTA] (1989)
Synopsis
The Winter War is a Finnish war film written and directed by Pekka Parikka. Based
on The Winter War, a novel by Antti Tuuri, the film tells the story of a platoon of
reservists from Kauhava (central Finland), part of an infantry regiment from South-
ern Ostrobothnia, fighting the Red Army on the Karelian Isthmus.Background
Just after the start of the Second World, the Soviet Union tried to bully neighbor-
ing Finland into ceding territory. The Finns chose to fight instead. The resulting
Winter War (30 November 1939–13 March 1940) between Finland and Rus sia was
the ultimate David and Goliath conflict— except, of course, that Goliath won. Actu-
ally it was a foregone conclusion that the Soviets would win, given their over-
whelming superiority in war matériel and manpower, but the Finns put up a
remarkable fight. During the war’s 105 days, they inflicted a third of a million