King Cong

King Cong is the principal Viet Cong antagonist in the screenplay for The Hamlet, an invented enemy whose spectacular brutality drives the film’s American rescue-and-revenge plot. The narrator’s account presents him not as a rounded character but as a deliberately enlarged threat: a guerrilla leader whose violence supplies the movie with its justification for destroying his stronghold and, in the process, reveals how the film converts Vietnamese people into material for an American story.

Identity and Construction

In the screenplay as the narrator understands it, King Cong commands veteran guerrillas concealed in the jungle near a hamlet on the Laotian border. He has also infiltrated the hamlet with sympathizers whose familiar faces conceal hostile intentions. The villagers’ defenders are the Popular Forces, farmers and teenagers trained by a team of United States Army Special Forces. King Cong is cast as the most fearsome of the guerrillas: committed to dying for his country and, more importantly to the screenplay’s logic, eager to kill for it. This makes him a military enemy and a melodramatic embodiment of the danger the American soldiers are sent to overcome.

The movie’s added Vietnamese characters make that construction especially visible. Binh, an older brother whose parents King Cong has killed, hates him, loves the American rescuers, and serves as their translator; the screenplay then gives Binh a grisly death alongside a Black Green Beret. Mai, Binh’s younger sister, falls in love with the idealistic Sergeant Jay Bellamy, only to be kidnapped and raped by King Cong. That assault becomes the stated justification for the Green Berets to annihilate King Cong’s forces. The youngest sibling, Danny Boy, survives to be crowned with a Yankees cap and carried by helicopter toward adoption by Bellamy’s family in St. Louis. King Cong’s function is therefore built into a tightly arranged sequence of victimization, retaliation, and American rescue: Vietnamese characters are given parts in the story, but their suffering propels the American characters’ action.

The Lair and the Spectacle of Destruction

The screenplay’s promised climax became the production’s largest act of manufactured devastation. The firefight at King Cong’s lair took several weeks to shoot, though it would occupy only about fifteen minutes on screen. Helicopters, rocket fire, gun battles, canned smoke, blank rounds, detonation cord, and explosives transformed the set into a spectacle so loud and disruptive that the local birds and animals disappeared and crew members protected their ears with cotton. The elaborate structures were built to be destroyed, making the demolition not an accident of the battle scene but one of its principal attractions.

The production’s demand for bodies extended the same logic from buildings to people. The script called for several hundred Viet Cong and Laotian deaths, but only a hundred extras were available, so many were made to die repeatedly, some four or five times. A napalm strike by two low-flying F-5s from the Philippine air force reduced the number of extras needed for the final days of filming; the hamlet was left with only twenty. In the resulting ghost-town scenes, performers made up as dismembered Vietnamese dead rose from the makeup tent at dawn when called to take their places. Fake limbs, exposed brains, and sausage intestines supplied the camera with grotesque remains, while a stray dog was to be released to gnaw at the artificial innards. Even the enemy’s dead were staged as a production resource, their injuries arranged to make the battle’s violence more convincing.

The sequence culminates in a simulated Arc Light strike on the lair after Will Shamus’s death. An unseen B-52 is said to drop thirty thousand pounds of bombs, while the set’s explosions are produced with trenches filled with two thousand gallons of gasoline, a thousand smoke bombs, phosphorous, dynamite, rockets, flares, and tracers. The director presents this climactic blast as the moment when making the movie becomes equivalent to going to war, and claims that the work of art will outlast the conflict. The narrator recognizes the sliver of truth in that boast—artifacts can survive the people whose lives a war consumed—but rejects its scale of values: the director’s grand vision elevates the film above the dead and the exploited extras whose bodies and repeated performances furnish its realism. King Cong’s annihilated lair thus becomes more than a fictional enemy stronghold. Its spectacular destruction exposes how the movie turns Vietnamese death into American cinematic power.

The Enemy as a Narrative Device

King Cong’s characterization compresses several histories of conflict into a single, outsized menace. The screenplay describes his guerrillas as veterans who had fought the French, extending their violence from the Central Highlands to the Street Without Joy, while presenting King Cong as the most lethal threat facing the border hamlet. His forces are not only hidden in the jungle: sympathizers have entered the village, their familiar appearances masking hostile intentions. That combination makes danger seem both military and intimate, surrounding the American defenders from outside and within. Yet the screenplay gives this enemy little existence beyond the threat he represents. His patriotism is acknowledged chiefly to sharpen the contrast with the Americans, while his appetite for killing and the lurid treatment of his violence turn Vietnamese resistance into a justification for American action.

The structure of the battle completes that transformation. After the Green Berets and the Popular Forces have killed the Viet Cong who tortured Binh and raped Mai, the camera’s world is left with a devastated lair, staged corpses, and the hiss of embers. The Vietnamese dead, including the Popular Forces, occupy the landscape as anonymous remains; King Cong’s defeat is made legible through the destruction of the place and the bodies associated with him. By making the fictional enemy’s stronghold the centerpiece of an elaborate cinematic blast, the production converts a conflict framed as rescue and revenge into a spectacle of American force. King Cong matters less as an individual than as the screen story’s mechanism for organizing Vietnamese suffering into a justification for that spectacle.

Representation and the Limits of Revision

The narrator’s notes alter the screenplay’s treatment of Vietnamese characters, first by rendering their screams as a written cry and then by adding Binh, Mai, and the younger boy as characters with speaking parts. Yet the revisions do not transfer control of the story to them. Binh’s hatred, translation, and death, Mai’s assault, and the boy’s removal to an American family all make Vietnamese lives legible through their relation to the Green Berets, especially Jay Bellamy. King Cong anchors this arrangement: his violence supplies the plot’s cause for retaliation, while the Vietnamese characters around him supply its victims and survivors. The added voices therefore mark a limited change in representation, not a change in who owns the narrative or whose actions determine its outcome.