The final frenetic scenes of the Vietnam War were branded in public memory a quarter of a century ago when a daisy chain of helicopters ferried frantic refugees from the American Embassy rooftop in Saigon to aircraft carriers bobbing in the South China Sea. On 30 April, a few hours after the last chopper fled, North Vietnamese tanks crashed the Presidential Palace gates and seized what was left of a terribly mutilated but reunited country. In the US the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of Saigon might be slipping by quietly in official circles. But documentary film-makers have certainly been paying attention.
Three fine new documentaries neatly illustrate the range of views that the war now provokes. Return With Honor , bankrolled by arms contractor Boeing-McDonnell, celebrates 'top guns' who literally were above it all until a flak burst or missile picked them off. 'We were flying Sir Lancelots,' one rueful pilot muses. 'All of a sudden you're not that any more and you're scared.' The film-makers opted to tell the saga based on 'the PoWs' mindset at the time,' which was (and is) staunchly militaristic. Yet Return reverberates with stunning little ironies.
Navy pilot Everett Alvarez debunks the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident (which triggered US escalation), attesting that he was in the air and saw no torpedo boats attacking US vessels, as was claimed. Soon, in an undeclared war, Alvarez found himself captured, labelled a criminal and under torture for eight and a half years.
Such experiences did not foster dissent. As film-maker Terry Sanders explains, captivity was hardly the time for macho officers to re-examine whether America ought to be there: 'If the President said to do this or that, then that was the thing to do.' So US fliers, who come across as brave and sincere, endured excruciating cruelties to force them to say far less, as one resentfully remarks, than sceptical politicians were saying out loud at home. (Some startled PoWs would discover on release that even their families had turned against the war.) The film-makers' decision to embrace the PoWs' point of view pays off with a claustrophobically intense narrative.
Conduct was no daintier down South. Vietcong captives were shoved out of helicopters without parachutes and tens of thousands of political prisoners suffered gruesomely at the hands of the corrupt regime. In Regret To Inform, a Vietnamese survivor attests that in the mangled multitude of free-fire zones: 'If you were not dead, you were not safe.' Another Vietnamese widow remembers her shock at her family home being obliterated by bombs, her six-year-old cousin killed by a nervous US soldier (and the soldier's horrified expression), and her self-hating bar-girl life afterwards. Writer-director Barbara Sonneborn, on her mournful but gripping train journey across Vietnam, explores 'the point of view of Vietnam war widows from both sides of the conflict' in hope of prying further open her audience's compassion.
Vietnam is not just a war but a country and a beautiful one at that. In Vietnam - Long Time Coming , the task that the makers of Hoop Dreams, the documentary about aspiring basketball players, set themselves was to show how jittery veterans come to terms with this emotionally healing fact. The documentary tracks US and Vietnamese war veterans pedalling bicycles (for the intact), hand cycles (for paraplegics) and tandem bikes (for the blind) 1,200 miles from Hanoi to the city formerly known as Saigon. 'It could have been worse,' a grinning vet remarks. 'Someone could have been shooting at us.'
For army nurse Diane Evans, the airliner's descent into Hanoi evoked 'the same gut-wrenching feeling as when I first flew into Tan Son Nhut 30 years ago. Vietnam was like a year-long hallucination.' This time the passengers were greeted by pretty girls offering flowers. 'It was the perfect gesture,' said Jerry Stadtmiller, a blinded ex-Marine. 'The [flower] gave me something to hold, other than my white cane. When you first came here you were handed an M-16.'
The party visit a school, a hospital and Hanoi's tomb of the unknown soldier. 'We discussed the wreath [for the tomb] beforehand,' said Wade Sanders, who commanded a Swift Boat on the Mekong River in 1968-69 and later was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. 'We had no problem doing it in the spirit of veteran honouring veteran.'
Pigeonholing vets such as Sanders is a perilous enterprise. In a seemingly strident screen moment he states that he was not ashamed of anything he did in Vietnam. So is he a rabid hawk ? 'I didn't approve of the war,' Sanders, who is running for a congressional seat in San Diego, says. 'I was saying that I didn't do anything I was ashamed of. Everyone I killed was trying to kill me.' As for the legacy of Vietnam, Evans said the government, 'sent 18- and 19-year-olds to Vietnam and it mistreated them after the war. I think it's unhealthy and harmful to trust your government. You should always question their agenda and their decisions. We were led like sheep in the 1960s.'
Kartemquin films, makers of Long Time Coming, hope their documentary will be shown in secondary schools and 'open up space for students to ask relatives who were Vietnam vets about how they felt'. 'There is a certain way society has processed this hero stuff so that the people, who are much more complex, felt constricted about how they expressed how they really felt about it,' Gordon Quinn, founder of Kartemquin, notes. 'We go to war so lightly. Before Clinton bombs Iraq or Serbia or any place else he ought to stand in front of the Vietnam memorial wall in Washington. It's a very powerful place.'
The three documentaries will preview at film festivals later this year.
