John Wayne and his son filmed a movie at Fort Benning in 1967. Did one of them hate Columbus?
John Wayne’s third oldest child, Patrick Wayne, appeared in 11 films with his father.
Of all of the sets and locations they shared, one still stands out as the worst ever to Patrick: Fort Benning.
Wayne and his crew filmed a portion of “The Green Berets” in the summer of 1967 at the Columbus base.
Wayne, known as “The Duke,” acted in and directed the movie in the grueling heat of a Georgia summer with one lung. Wayne had the majority of his other lung removed during his battle with cancer in 1964, but returned to acting in January 1965.
Wayne was heartily invested in the movie. As part of his research, he traveled to Vietnam with the USO.
According to johnwayne.com, “From 6 a.m. to 10 at night, Wayne would walk around and introduce himself to GI’s.” Seeing what the soldiers went through motivated Wayne to make “The Green Berets” as authentic as possible. He contacted President Lyndon B. Johnson and was granted the use of props from the pentagon as well as permission to shoot at Fort Benning.
Wayne’s son Patrick reminisced about the experience in “John Wayne Gritcast,” a podcast hosted by his brother, Ethan Wayne., and the story makes for an interesting part of Columbus history.
“We were in a horrible place. I mean Columbus, Georgia, was like the worst place on the face of the earth,” Patrick told siblings Ethan and Marisa.
In an interview posted on Medium, Patrick went into more detail about Columbus.
“Oh my God, it was pretty dreary. That’s fine, but it started raining to the point of where we couldn’t even work. Boy, there was nothing to do except sit there and wait ‘til it stopped raining,” he said.
Columbus weather mirrored the war movie’s South Vietnam setting.
“It was a pretty miserable experience from the weather aspect at that time (filming commenced) on August 9, 1967. It was past the worst part of the summer, so the humidity wasn’t that bad,” Patrick said.
The weather wasn’t the only memorable part of Patrick’s Columbus ordeal. “All this crazy stuff was going on while we were there making a movie,” he said.
He recalled the soldiers he encountered, back from Vietnam were a little wild. They took the then 29-year-old up in a helicopter and let him shoot at the Vietnam set constructed for the movie at Fort Benning.
In another unforgettable Fort Benning experience, Patrick was at the base when a colonel who was head of the jump school had an accident jumping out of a plane.
“His first chute didn’t open and the reserve didn’t open and he crashed. But he lived, he walked away from it,” Patrick said. “And he went to where they were packing the chutes and he said, ‘Pick it up. Whatever you’re packing, pick it up.’ He took them into the airplane and made them jump out of the chute they were packing. Those people packed the hell out of [the parachutes] very carefully after that with the thought that they may be using them if this guy ordered them to jump out of a plane again.”
This story was originally published April 4, 2022 at 6:50 AM.
