Almost a quarter of the US ground troops in the Vietnam War were African American.
Yet, despite this, Hollywood has largely ignored the African American experience of Vietnam.
Francis Coppola, Oliver Stone and Stanley Kubrick all had African American characters on the periphery of their movies about the conflict.
However the main characters in 'Apocalypse Now,' 'Platoon' and 'Full Metal Jacket' were understandably, given their directors' experiences, all white.
As for other depictions of the Vietnam experience, Mykelti Williamson's Bubba in Robert Zemeckis' epic comedy 'Forrest Gump' is probably the best known fictional soldier from an African American background but he doesn't get that long to shine.
So it is safe to say there's been a gaping hole in Hollywood's documenting of the Vietnam War experience and it has taken until 2020 to fill it in.
Spike Lee's Vietnam epic 'Da 5 Bloods' has landed on Netflix just as America and the world has been shaken by the death in police custody of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the Black Lives Matter protests.
A world reeling from the Coronavirus pandemuc has also been disturbed by US President Donald Trump's tone deaf handling of the racism crisis that has engulfed his country.
Inevitably Trump and his ambivalence towards racism hovers over 'Da 5 Bloods' - a follow-up to Lee's Oscar winning 'Blackkklansman' in which the New York director took a very pointed swipe at the President's response to Nazi and White Supremacist violence in Charlottesville.
A tale of four Vietnam vets returning to locate the body of a former comrade and some burued treasure, 'Da 5 Bloods' features an emotionally battered character, Delroy Lindo's Paul who is a rare African American Trump supporter.
He even sports a Make America Great Again red baseball cap.
However the two hours and 35 minutes film, scripted by Lee, Danny Nilson, Paul de Meo and Kevin Willmott, also uses archive footage to reflect on a war that did very little to advance the cause of the African Americans who fought for their country.
The film is bookended by two leading African Americans who criticised the war - Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King.
It opens with a montage of Ali explaining why he has refused to serve his country in Vietnam and Kwame Ture and Angela Davis expressing their opposition to the war.
The montage also features Malcolm X and the black power salute given by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
But it is Davis' comments that hit home the hardest, in the two weeks of protest that have followed George Floyd's recent death at the hands of the police.
"If the link is not made between what is happening in Vietnam and what is happening here, we may very well face a period of full-blown fascism soon."
Lee's film finds Lindo's Paul linking up with Clark Peters' Otis, Isiah Whitlock Jr's wisecracking Melvin and Norm Lewis' pigeon toed car dealer Eddie in modern day Ho Chi Minh City as they prepare to embark on a trek through the jungle to the place where their comrade in arms, Chadwick Boseman's 'Stormin' Norman Holloway lost his life.
Flitting regularly between the past and the present, Lee very deliberately chooses not to take the same path as Martin Scorsese in his Netflix film 'The Irishman', using digital technology to create younger versions of his cast.
Instead, Lindo, Peters, Whitlock Jr and Lewis pretty much appear as they do now in the flashback sequences - as if to illustrate how the past very much impacts on the present.
In these sequences, we learn that Norman was an inspirational leader of their gang known as Da 5 Bloods.
After their helicopter is felled during a Viet Cong attack, they manage to shoot their way out of a tight corner and send the enemy scurrying.
However the Bloods also stumble across a plane containing a trunk of gold bullion.
Norman proposes they bury the trunk and return to it at a later date, with the intention of giving it to African American causes to make reparations for centuries of maltreatment.
However it soon becomes clear in the modern day that while the remaining Bloods talk about recovering Norm's remains, their real sights are focused on finding the gold more for personal gain rather than out of any great loyalty to the African American cause.
Otis uses his visit to reconnect with Le Y Lan's Tien, a former prostitute with whom we discover he fathered a daughter.
Tien, who is now making a fortune in financial services, is Otis' link to Jean Reno's shifty French businessman Desroche who agrees to shift any gold bars they recover.
Paul's schoolteacher son, Jonathan Majors' David also turns up in Ho Chi Minh City, revealing he has discovered their plan to recover the gold and he wants a piece of the action.
Much to the four remaining Bloods' displeasure, he joins them - although it soon becomes clear his presence is as much about connecting with his father who has never really warmed to him.
The gang sets off on their epic adventure with Johnny Tri Nguyen's guide Vinh by boat and then jeep.
Along the way, they encounter Melanie Thierry's anti-landmine campaigner Hedy Bouvier and her colleagues, Paul Walter Hauser's Simon and Jasper Paakkonen's Seppo.
But will they find the gold and Norman's remains?
'Da 5 Bloods' is an entertaining enough romp that gives a fresh perspective on a war that Hollywood has lavished a lot of attention on over the years.
However, you cannot help feeling it should offer a whole lot more.
'Da 5 Bloods' frequently feels like two different movies competing for its audience's love and attention.
As a result, it is frustrating to watch.
On the one hand, Lee has constructed an interesting drama about a group of ageing men struggling with their involvement in a war that they had mixed feelings about in the first place, working through the scars of all of that and their own personal failures.
On the other, he has come up with a movie that feels like a cross between a jungle adventure and a heist movie.
Some viewers will rightly view 'Da 5 Bloods' as a hybrid of Michael Cimino's 'The Deer Hunter' and John Huston's 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre'.
Huston's film, in particular, is a huge influence - also serving as a fable about greed.
However 'Da 5 Bloods' also recalls David O Russell's escapade 'The Three Kings,' with elements of 'Apocalypse Now' and Oliver Stone's Vietnam War trilogy thrown in for good measure.
Unfortunately, the action adventure sits uneasily with the political commentary and it gets in the way of a good drama.
That is a shame because the film boasts a terrific performance by Delroy Lindo as the PTSD affected Paul.
Lindo embraces the mania that increasingly grips Paul without resorting to scene chewing histrionics.
His performance should catch awards season attention - assuming Covid-19 does not disrupt 2021's awards season.
However, it has to be said that the screenwriters have also gifted him the richest part.
Whitlock Jr, Lewis, Peters and Majors are overshadowed and have to work with a lot less, although Boseman once again demonstrates his star charisma - even in a supporting role.
Outside of Lindo and Boseman, Peters does a decent job trying to flesh out what's he got.
Meanwhile Reno, Thierry, Hauser, Paakkonen, Le Y Lan and Johnny Tri Nguyen do what is expected of them - keeping the plot rolling along without ever really shining.
Ultimately the action adventure elements just distract from what could be an engrossing character drama.
They feel too slight in a film that has an awful lot to say and it is odd to see Lee shy away from character driven drama and resort to Tarantinoesque escapism.
Nevertheless it should be said that Lee handles the battle sequences well, revelling in his chance to move out of New York's concrete jungle.
He is very much helped by Newton Thomas Sigel's assured camera work which plunges the viewer right into the heart of the gunfire and drinks in the lush, humid atmosphere of the jungle and rice fields.
Composer Terence Blanchard's score also hits a jarring note - seeming a little overwrought and intrusive.
Nonetheless, 'Da 5 Bloods' is a watchable movie, bursting with loads of interesting ideas.
It's just a pity that it is so uncertain about the type of movie it wants to be and consequently it struggles to rein its ideas in.
The film is at its best when Lee forces his audience to confront uneasy questions about America's past and present.
However the director's failure to settle on the right narrative vehicle means that 'Da 5 Bloods' never comes close to scaling the heights of his three greatest movies, 'Do The Right Thing,' 'Malcolm X' or 'Blackkklansman'.
If 'Da 5 Bloods' inspires more movies about the African American soldier's experience of Vietnam and other conflicts, that will be a good legacy.
It just comes as a bit of a disappointment that Lee's film is so conflicted about how to convey that experience.
('Da 5 Bloods' was made available for streaming on Netflix on June 12, 2020)
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