On April 29th a trailer of “The Endless War” will be premiered at the Charles Theater as part of its Sunday Cinema Program. The film is produced by Baltimore native and former Boys Latin and Severn School student, Lehr Jackson. In the late 1960’s, at the height of the Vietnam War, Jackson was a Marine Corps aviator with 230 missions over North and South Vietnam. The film explores the horrors of the war and the politized way that the conflict was hampered juxtaposed against a group of soldiers in Chu Lai (Jackson among them) who managed to escape the by then acknowledged unwinnable war in their off-duty hours. Their base became known as the Chu Lai Beach Club, or as Bob Hope called it on one of his in- country tours, the Malibu Beach for Losers. The unlikely, but much needed, R & R activities undertaken there daily included surfing, water skiing, sailing, basketball, even golf, along with parties on the beach with bikini-clad nurses and visiting troop entertainers.

This is a story of a mission led by our principal characters, Marines Jackson and Fraley, whose only purpose was to keep their brothers and sisters in arms from falling over the edge. The options were “Prisoners in Paradise” or “Soldiers in Hell.”.We chose the beach as our base of operations and our mission as survival. A few hours on the beach was therapy and it saved many stressed soldiers and helped them return home. The Club was financed by all the members who invested in either black market contraband or services rendered. No one at the freight depot knew what might be off- loaded from a C130 inbound from Hong Kong--a skiboat fully outfitted, a dozen surf boards, a Hobie catamaran or scuba gear. Our mandate was “improvise and survive” and our theme song was “We Got to Get Out of This Place” by the Animals only to arrive home to an ungrateful fractured nation.