Armed Forces

An Asian dishwasher (not so fluent in English) had just breaking some glasses in a kitchen restaurant. He took the fall even if it was boss fault and threw the pieces into the dumpster, noticing a dead body lying on the ground. The dead man is a poor bootblack and like all tramps he aged more than common people. Detectives went to his rat- hole, a basement in Queens very messy, where they found out he was a Vietnam War veteran rewarded with bronze star for his duty. A local Asian lowlife witness was the prime suspect, but he did nothing apart from beating him (together with his gang); anyway he told the detectives about a classy car at the crime scene shortly before the killing. Some of victim's buddies in Vietnam managed to succeed (one became mayor and another a successful businessman) and the victim (recently diagnosed with lung cancer) wanted to tell the truth about what really happened in that village in Vietnam.....

An episode related to Vietnam post-war syndrome, maybe the first one in Law & Order. A witness reports at trial (with the help of a translator) what happened to her family and village thirty years after the event. I've already seen too much about this in Hollywood movies.

The victim in this case was about as far down on the economic scale as you can get. A vagabond who worked as a shoeshine man near the courthouses downtown he's found in that area beaten to death. The investigation only goes so far and the DA's office personally takes it over.

What Sam Waterston and Elizabeth Rohm find is that he was decorated for his valor during a fire fight at a village in Vietnam. But this thing turns out to be more like a mini version of My Lai.

Three men, Stephen Morehouse, Jack Willis, and Charles Brown who are all pretty successful now were in Vietnam with the deceased. They have no reason for wanting what happened over there to come out now. That makes them suspects in the eyes of the law.

The show is quite an indictment on how we treat our veterans, then and now.

"Armed Forces" was one of those 'Law and Order' episodes on first watch that had a number of good things but did feel on the ordinary side and didn't stick in the mind long after. There are episodes of the show and the 'Law and Order' franchise in general that felt like this, but there are many on both counts where that type of episode on first watch fared better on rewatch and were better than remembered seeing it through older eyes.

My generally positive, if not entirely enthusiastic, opinion of "Armed Forces" is pretty much the same and is one of those episodes described above. There is a lot to like about it, but considering the subject there was room for it to have been even better than it turned out. The right amount of emotion is here, but it is a bit lacking in the subtlety department (which is actually not easy to do for this subject when recounting horrific experiences).

Beginning with the not so good, the investigative scenes are a little routine and ordinary with some of it feeling too much like familiar ground. Also did think that it was heavy handed on occasions with everything concerning Vietnam where the writers' stance on the issue is made clear rather than seeing it from all sides.

Elisabeth Rohm is still incredibly wooden and there is no warmth at all to Southerlyn.

However, so much succeeds. Production values are slick and have a subtle grit, with an intimacy to the photography without being too claustrophobic. The music isn't used too much and doesn't get too melodramatic.

The dialogue is smart and always intriguing and on the whole the story is very compelling and wrenches the gut to intense and heart-wrenching effect. The recounting of the horrific events are truly unspeakable. The acting is very good, with Rohm being the one exception.

Concluding, good if not great. 7/10.

So, the Law and Order franchise does not have a good track record portraying Asian victims. Perhaps this is reflective of the NYC or the people making the show, but in addition to having no major Asian characters -- in a city with 1.2 million Asian Americans! -- it often treats Asian characters as meek, foreign, or malevolent. You know, all the standard stereotypes that have been around for at least 100 years in American popular entertainment.

This episode is more or less an adaption of the My Lai massacre, where a group of mostly White American soldiers slaughtered men, women, and children in a village. It wasn't the only such war crime in Vietnam, but it was the one that got headlines. Eventually, nothing really happened to any of the soldiers who were tried, and the obvious racial angles of a group of Whites slaughtering Asians was, as usual, dismissed as just the tragedy of war.

This episode follows a similar perspective -- at the end, we even have a self-righteous homily by McCoy about how these were just kids. Yeah. This is the same McCoy who prosecuted kids as adults. Unlike the superior Michael Moriarty character, Ben Stone, McCoy was constantly waffling on his principles. This week, he might -- Alan Alda style -- pontificate about a particular social cause he favors. Next week, he might take exactly the opposite stance. Binge watch Law and Order, and the inconsistency becomes far more obvious.

There are other moments, too. They end up dragging some poor elderly Vietnamese woman over the NYC, only to throw out her testimony because she apparently didn't directly witness anything. What? No one interviewed her beforehand? And everyone talks about her like she's an object rather than a person, their tone either condescending (the blond defense attorney) or matter of fact (McCoy, who seems indifferent to his own witness). Just unsavory.

In the end, there's a cavalry-over-the-hill arrival that saves the case, but even then, the two accused men -- privileged White men -- are more disgusted that they were accused than that they murdered people. Yes, this may be accurate to reality, but the episode offers little in the way of condemnation for it, with McCoy's idiotic epiphany at the end especially insulting. Not Law and Order's finest hour.