PROPOSED VIETNAM FILM: A REAL BATTLE, WRITTEN BY A VETERAN

It was known on military maps simply as Hill 937. In May, 1969, riflemen of the 101st Airborne Division battled North Vietnamese troops dug in on that rugged, mist-shrouded mountain, located in the A Shau Valley, 35 miles southwest of Hue.

It was a brutal fight. There were enemy bunkers all the way, interlocking fields of fire, Claymore mines strung in trees and exploded against the Americans crawling upward. Hill 937 was cratered and blasted bare by air strikes and hundreds of artillery shells.

When the 11-day battle ended and the grimy, exhausted paratroopers finally held the mountain, 62 Americans were dead and 420 wounded. The U.S. command estimated that nearly 600 North Vietnamese had been killed.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), a vociferous critic of the Vietnam War, called such assaults “senseless and irresponsible.” The commander of the 101st, Maj. Gen. Melvin Zais, didn’t reply to that directly, but told reporters:

“People are still acting like this was a catastrophe for U.S. troops. . . . This was a tremendous, gallant victory by a bunch of gutty guys.”

By then, a lot of the guys were calling Hill 937 “Hamburger Hill.”

“Hamburger Hill” now is the name of a proposed movie about that controversial battle. The script is by James Carabatsos. He alternately laughs at or ridicules such previous Hollywood-goes-to-Vietnam epics as “Apocalypse Now” or “The Deer Hunter.”

The reason: Neither showed the war he knew. But then, the authors of those works never served in Vietnam and he did. He was in the war’s class of 1968-69, he said, in the First Air Cavalry Division, in a military police platoon at Quan Loi near the Cambodian border.

“ ‘Apocalypse’ was so stupid--made us look like idiots, all doped up on the line, with NVA (North Vietnamese soldiers) running around in the open, a USO tour all lit up in the jungle, Playboy Bunnies boogeying up there on a stage,” he said. “And ‘Deer Hunter’--a Green Beret with a goatee? Come on, who are they kidding?”

“ ‘Coming Home’ ain’t it, either. Maybe ‘Go Tell the Spartans’ was valid,” he said, referring to the 1978 Burt Lancaster film about early U.S. involvement in Vietnam. “Because that’s what was going on there in 1964.

“But as far as a film about the war fought by the draftees, well, I haven’t seen it yet. Because they’re not being done by the people who were there. They’re being done by people who must believe that that”--a crazed, drugged-out war--”is the story.”

Carabatsos, 39, could prove one of the first Vietnam veterans now working as a Hollywood scriptwriter to get his vision of the war into movie houses across the nation.

(Another, better-known writer who also served there, Oliver Stone, the Oscar-winning director of “Midnight Express,” also is trying with a script called “Platoon.”)

But Carabatsos and his project still have a long way to go. No financing for “Hamburger Hill” has turned up yet. If it ever does, it will be due to Marcia Nasatir, an independent producer in New York who is backing him and has a measure of clout in the industry.

She was co-executive producer of “The Big Chill,” the sleeper hit about a group of young Americans a decade after the war. In that film, William Hurt played the group’s sole Vietnam veteran.

Nasatir, who said her son, Seth, served in Vietnam but not in a combat unit, said “Hill” is linked to her 1983 movie in a way: It seeks to show what young American infantrymen in Vietnam actually experienced in the war.

“Someone once said to me, because of my involvement in ‘The Big Chill,’ that ‘that’s the kind of movie we’d really like to make,’ ” she recalled in a phone interview from New York.

“And I said, ‘That’s what you’re going to get with “Hamburger Hill”--meet the people that the Bill Hurt character served in the war with.’ ”

Carabatsos has had three film scripts produced. Only one concerned Vietnam--”Heroes” in 1977. It starred Henry Winkler as a Vietnam veteran trying to cope with an American home front that, if not hostile to Vietnam vets, hadn’t much respect for them--or feared them.

His latest effort intends no political statement about the war, Carabatsos emphasizes. He says it’s just a “bloody simple” story about going to war, the loopy, often black humor of a combat zone, and the way one battle went for a scared squad of young draftees.

“It’s like this ‘grizzled’ 20-year-old buck sergeant tells these guys in the script,” he says. “He just wants to keep them alive. He tells them, ‘When you go out there, you leave your attitudes behind. Whether you’re for or against the war doesn’t matter.’ ”

His script about the war doesn’t concern extraordinary heroism, innocent civilians, or drugs, he adds. Hamburger Hill was a straightforward battle, North Vietnamese regulars against U.S. troops.

All he’s written about, he says, is how the young American riflemen saw the battle: “A lot of it is about trying to stay dry, trying to get chow and dry socks. They don’t kill mama-sans or papa-sans. And like the sergeant says, ‘You want to blow some dope, fine. But not out in the bush. The guys don’t do it out there, and you don’t.’ ”

Nasatir has been an executive in the film business for 15 years. Besides “The Big Chill,” her track record includes stints as president of Johnny Carson Productions’ film division and as a senior executive at 20th Century Fox.

What she keeps hearing about “Hamburger Hill” from those rejecting it, she says, is the old story, that “it’s not commercial. They don’t think there’s an audience for it.”

Carabatsos, a New York City native, has a different, darker theory.

“It’s really the guilt of the people who didn’t go to Vietnam,” he says, speaking of movie executives who, like him, were in their 20s during the war. “They’re more interested in proving their own rationale for not going”--namely, that the war was immoral and those who fought in it came back poisoned by it.

The former doesn’t annoy him nearly as much as the latter.

“It wasn’t all ‘I don’t believe in this war and I’m not going.’ Most of it was ‘I don’t want to get shot at,’ ” he said. “And, hey, there’s nothing wrong with that.’

“But I can’t get through that feeling, that all veterans are crazy,” he said, emphasizing that he never thought the feeling was exclusive to Hollywood.

“All that stuff about the disenchantment of Vietnam happened when you got home,” he said. “The seeds were all planted, but I think the biggest problem was when you came home. That’s when you really got badgered about it.”

Nasatir started counting when asked how many studios, movie moguls or combinations thereof have rejected “Hamburger Hill.”

“We’ve been turned down in maybe seven places so far,” she said. “But since ‘The Big Chill’ was turned down in 14 places, I don’t feel that’s so terrible. We’ll make it.”

Carabatsos was equally optimistic.

“I don’t get discouraged,” he said. “I get ticked off, highly, but not discouraged. . . . I remember when I first came out here, everyone was telling me how tough Hollywood was. I said, ‘Funny, I don’t see any 107s (rockets) coming in; nobody’s shooting at you.’

“What’s really irritating is that they’ll be making a few more of these (Vietnam films), and they’re going to make them in ‘their vision.’ And their vision doesn’t have a damn to do with what happened over there.”

The makers of most previous Vietnam films, he said, seem to be telling the families of Vietnam veterans, “ ‘Hey, your son or husband or father is a real maniac, a psychopath, because this is what we have to believe.’

“And nobody yet is saying that the guys who were in Vietnam are no different from the guys who were at Iwo Jima or at the Chosin Reservoir--just as brave, just as courageous.”

That’s basically why he wants “Hamburger Hill” made: “It’s for the guys who were there, for their families. I’m hoping maybe some wife (of a veteran) will understand her husband a little better, or some kid will understand his father a little better.”