"Now, they told us that Vietnam was gonna be very different from the United States of America. Except for all the beer cans and the barbecue, it was." - Forrest Gump.

There is little that is accurate in the depiction of Forrest Gump's first encounter with the US Army in South Vietnam. It is loosely implied that they are in a field camp company area of A company, 2/47th, 9th Infantry Division at an unspecified date. The scene resembles like a big beach party with The Four Tops' I Can't Help Myself blaring in the background. In the background, dozens of UH-1 'Huey' helicopters pass through. We, as a viewer, know we're in South Vietnam. The choppers, the 60s music, the casual soldiers - but it's still glaringly different from anything we have to come to expect from a depiction of South Vietnam. What gives?

The scene continues. We get our first interaction between Gump and Lt. Dan. Upon saluting, Lt. Dan tells Gump and Bubba to not salute him because "there are goddamn snipers all around this area who would love to grease an officer." He then welcomes them to "Fort Platoon" (a fictional name). Immediately, we know they're close the field and in the presence of the enemy - yet the behavior of all the soldiers around them are the opposite of what you would expect. Yet, the scenes that follow which shows Gump and his fellow soldiers out on patrol all stick to a somewhat realistic depiction. Once more, what gives?

The first thing we need to keep in mind, as we always should when dealing with film, is that it is fiction. Therefore, the choices that have been made are not necessarily drawn upon realism in as much as a fictionalized realism, a construction of what the Vietnam War was. Historians dealing with film and fiction today does not focus as much on what films get wrong but rather why they get it wrong. What's the purpose of the choices they've made in their depiction? Clearly, in the case of Forrest Gump, it is establishing that we're in the fictional land of pop culture Vietnam War drawn from previous movies like Apocalypse Now (the Huey's in the background clearly drawing from it), Full Metal Jacket (the entire introduction of Gump to military life is drawing from it) and Platoon (which we can attribute the later scenes in the bush). I could for example point out that the 2/47th was a mechanized battalion and that Gump would have been patrolling on an M-113 in real life -- but that's not going to help us understand the purpose of this scene.

Instead, I'd point out to the quote that I started this answer with. To Forrest Gump, South Vietnam was very different from the United States. In this, he was not alone. American soldiers had very mixed reactions upon encountering South Vietnam for the first time. The heat, the strange customs, behavior, and language of the South Vietnamese people as well as the smell are all things American soldiers felt were strange to them. But even familiar military life put in contrast to the danger of being in South Vietnam could be strange. Take this account as an example:

We flew into Cam Ranh Bay and as we were coming in I’m looking out my window and as we are coming close to the ground I can see village huts. I saw some destroyed vehicles such as tanks or some kind of destroyed vehicles and I thought, “Oh, man. We’re landing right in the middle, landing right in a hot zone.” I’m looking around and I said, “Man, they should be passing out weapons anytime now. We’re going into a war zone.” I didn’t know what to expect and I kept waiting. “Where’s our weapons? Where’s our weapons?” The plane lands and as we taxi around now I’m looking out of the other side of the window and what do I see? I see a beautiful bay. I see white silver sands. You know, it’s a military installation but there is people walking around with their shirts off, they’ve got a nice tan. I said, “Man, this is Vietnam? This looks like Hawaii or some place.” Now I wasn’t as scared as I was when we first landed. When we got off the plane then it hit you, the heat and the humidity.

The soldier in question, Arthur Wiknik of the 101st Abn. Division, was arriving at a safe place and would first be ferried to a replacement battalion before being sent onwards to the 101st in the field (like Gump is as he arrives at his camp). It is a telling account similar to what we're seeing depicted in the movie, but Wiknik is going from a presumed dangerous warlike situation to a mellow, administrative setting in the rear. I'd like to argue that Gump's experience is the reverse -- without him knowing or recognizing it as such.

It can therefore be suggested that the purpose of the scene is not to show the reality of camp life in the Vietnam War but rather to show how Gump is reacting to his new reality in a foreign country, yet we do know that Gump thinks and conceptualizes things very different from us. Therefore, it is only fitting that a beach party in a war zone is shown to us to put us there with Gump: Yeah, this is very different. For Gump, it was everything except for the beer cans and the barbecue. For us, it is the beer cans and barbecue that is different from previous depictions of the Vietnam War on film.