I was surprised that they changed Harry's service from Vietnam to the Gulf.
His experience in the tunnels of Vietnam is an important part of who he is and emphasises the whole light v dark thing Connelly has going on in all of his Bosch books.
Is Vietnam that far out now that it couldn't have been used?
this was alluded to on the other thread about 'martial arts"
I am not familiar with the books, so knew nothing of this tunnel-rat service of Bosch's or the obvious implications of that, but, as for timelines, answer is yes, do the math..if the guy is a Vietnam vet, he cannot be played by Welliver, he has to be aged so much that he is either close to retirement age, or past it..
it's possible to have a veteran cop maybe still working that age, but..really, either the back-story had to come forward at least one war, preferably two...or the whole show had to go back at least one gen..
like I said...peak fighting for US in Vietnam was 1965-1972...whole thing ended 1975.
Yes, it is a *beep* long time ago...Nixon had just resigned year b4, Ali was still having fights with Frazier which I was watching live satellite on opposite side of world...and that is when the war ended.
At it's peak, they had just locked up Ali for refusing the Draft, and Timothy Leary was trying to levitate the White House...Woodstock was still a year or two off..
our other show 'Aquarius" subject about Manson's family was still a lead newspaper story..
Yeah, I think that Vietnam is a bit too long ago for the purposes of the show.
Timing is always a problem with long-running series. I remember that Reginald Hill noted ((in a foreword) that his novels about Yorkshire detectives Dalziel and Pascoe mention several then-current events (like the coal-miners strike) over many years, yet the characters themselves don't seem to age much. He then posited that they had been aging more slowly than the world, and that they would continue their careers farther into the future, leading to the 1990 novella One Small Step, in which Dalziel and Pascoe investigate a murder on the moon in 2010.
Although I haven't seen Season 2 yet, I see that it is partly based on the novel The DROP. This is one of the more-or-less recent ones, one of several in which Harry is fighting retirement (using, as I recall, the department's Deferred Retirement Option Plan or some such). The books have Harry aging and fighting retirement (and occasionally free-lancing), but I can see that if the tv show wants to show a middle-aged Harry in a contemporary setting, it will have to make some drastic changes to his history.
I forget whether the tv Harry is described as the "tunnel rat" that the novel Harry had been (and this plays an important part in the first Bosch novel, The Black Echo). Although there were a lot of tunnel fighting in Vietnam, I haven't heard that it was much of it in Iraq or Afghanistan--or, indeed, how possible it is to dig tunnels there. (Caves in Afghanistan, yes, I suppose.) Bosch's Wikipedia entry claims that he is a few inches shorter than Welliver's six feet; I would have thought that a successful "tunnel rat" would ideally be a lot shorter even than that.
(Coincidentally, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio current-events show The Current had an episode this morning that mentioned the real-life heist that forms the fictional centre of The Black Echo http://www.cbc.ca/radio/popup/audio/listen.html?autoPlay=true&clipIds=&mediaIds=2687478089&contentarea=radio&subsection1=radio1&subsection2=currentaffairs&subsection3=the_current&contenttype=audio. The link worked this afternoon, but if it doesn't work later, one can try www.cbc.ca/thecurrent) and look for the article "How burglars use city architecture as opportunity for heists and escapes".)
@OP- there was almost no way they could have made Bosch a Vietnam vet in the series. He would have been far too old. The timing fits fairly well (based on the the original books timeline) to make the TV Bosch a Gulf War vet.
"Time is the fire in which we burn."
They did, however, in the first season, mention he had tunnel rat experience in Afghanistan, adapting his character's experience.
This has been done in several series, when brought to the screen. Stephen King mentioned it in his update of 'The Stand', when he had to rewrite the scene of the characters bump-starting a car and update the make and model from the book to the screen.
BOHICA America!
The only real option would have been to follow the books from a time a perspective(starting in early 90's) as opposed to 2015.
The books and the show are quite different, with some similarities.
Yes, Vietnam is too far back. Connelly tells us in the first Bosch novel The Black Echo [1992] that Bosch is 40 years old. He would have been born in 1952 which would make him 63 years old in 2015.
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Vietnam is too far back for 2015.. Sure.
But, set it in the same time line as the books... keeps the story line more accurate. Put some makeup on Titus... for some of the earlier stuff..
If they made him a Vietnam veteran, as in the books, either the show would have to be set in the '90s (like the books), or Harry would have to be about seventy years old. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with either of those alternatives, but I think they wanted a middle-aged protagonist, not an elderly one.
shareYes, having to update Harry to the Gulf War was probably a necessary time frame choice, so that they did not have to undergo the extreme expense and trouble of producing a period show that would have to have 1990s---everything. Cars, clothes, the works. Making it current was likely a wise choice.
But the poster above is correct that Harry's tunnel experience in Vietnam is the core and being of who he is as a cop. It informs his life--the way he lives it, the way he sees things, and the way he knows to be cautious in threatening situations. The Black Echo explained it all perfectly.
The tunnel rat is who Harry is on the streets and on the job. It's what he knows and it's a great way to do writer's shorthand on who Harry's basic make-up as a person and a cop..
But they could not have it all I guess. Some compromises had to be done to bring it into contemporary LA. Glad Connelly got some tunnel mention in anyway with regard to Harry in Afghanistan.
Not exactly the same meaningful thing as the legendary tunnel rats of Vietnam lore, but it's something.