Winter Soldier

This is virtually ninety-plus minutes of testimonials of 'war crimes' by Vietnam vets at a conference in 1971, and while all of the atrocities - there's no other word for them - were the kinds of things I'd seen before, the sheer numbers were what got to me. Not the numbers of tortured and dead; that number I don't suppose I'll ever digest. It's the numbers of decent Americans like you or me who through exaggerated training of 'manhood', became savages. One can better understand what it must have been like to come home to our normal world of shopping malls, fast food, and sitcoms, and try to stuff back the memories and repressed emotions that made one kill children for fun and hack off body parts for a reward of a six-pack. Actually, I still can't understand it. I don't suppose I'll ever know at one point one stops becoming human, but at least I did find some hope in seeing these hundreds of men who found their humanity again after the war. Don't think that this is a film that tries to make Americans look bad, for virtually every culture in the world has had its share of atrocities. The atrocities are the symptom; war is the disease. From that perspective, I wish the film had gone further in having someone articulate the ignorance that these guys had in even going into this war. They really only understood why they were sent to fight when they returned, and it's that ignorance that is the virus that our government - that all governments and extremists - like to spread. The most upsetting image I saw in this film was a snapshot of an American soldier smiling over the exposed body of one of his kill. The chill down the back of my neck hit me before my mind brought up what it reminded me of. The smile on that soldier's face was the exact same smile that one of the soldiers Abu Ghraib had as he stood over a pile of naked bodies and crooked his thumbs up in a sign of victorious glee. The horror is that it just never stops.

People will believe what they want to believe. That's about it. I have no doubt that these men were telling the truth. They weren't trying to one up one another-who could brag about killing children. They were trying to show that atrocities were common in Vietnam, which they were. It's too bad more veterans don't talk about their experiences. The more people know about warfare, the less likely they will be to support it. And that was the aim of the Winter Soldier panel. And that is why it was banned. The American media was so scared of this documentary, they refused to show it. The truth needs to be concealed or ignored, so that the U.S. government can continue interfering militarily in the affairs of other countries. The US media has continued to conceal coverage of combat footage since the Vietnam War. Just recently Wikileaks exposed combat footage that would have outraged Americans from coast to coast, yet it was only mentioned on CNN and not shown, and not mentioned or shown on all the other network and cable news. So the truth is more than ever ignored. Let the censorship continue.

I thought I knew about Vietnam. I hadn't really studied it as such and, in England, it isn't taught very in depth, if at all in the state schools so I only thought I knew about it from various sources that I had absorbed it from during my life: Movies being the main source which, I used to think, rightly so in most cases, were just sensationalism and that a lot of the horrific things were just made worse for the movie. I had read the odd article too and I was aware of certain atrocities but even then it din't seem to sink in and really get into my brain just how bad that terrible war was. It wasn't like any other war.

In the words of one of the veterans on this film, it was like a game where the winner is the one who kills the most...be them civilians or Viet Cong.

Watching this made me close to tears.

To hear the guys that actually committed these horrendous acts against what were, in the main, innocent civilian villagers who knew nothing of what they had supposedly done to deserve it and were shot for fun or just because they happened to be there,..well, hearing the guys telling the stories makes this one of the most harrowing yet poignant movies you could ever watch.

I think it should be shown in schools as a matter of course.

Man turned into Animal by the system that convinced him he was doing it for his country; his people; his fathers and his freedom.

What a load of rubbish.

These guys suffered so much and when some of them even attempt to tell the horrors they just cannot face it. You can see the look on their eyes: It tells it all.

I recommend this to anyone who has come by here to see if it is worth watching or not. Not only worth watching but it is REQUIRED VIEWING! Please keep this and show it to your children when they are older so that they might see what happened in this dark period of our so called 'civilized' history of the 20th century.

I hope those veterans were somehow able to put their ghosts to rest but somehow I doubt that.

This film consisted almost entirely of talking heads, but held the attention of the audience from start to end at a screening organised by the Socialist Workers Party. It was introduced by a Vietnam veteran slating the UK Labour party for applauding Tony Blair "the 2nd most hated man in the world" on his farewell speech.

The film was mainly shot at a public hearing, organised by Veterans against the war (featuring John Kerry), where former soldiers talked about truly disgusting atrocities against men, women and children that they saw or themselves committed. They are described in a matter-of-fact fashion, because they were an everyday occurrence. They also talk about how they were trained, the dehumanising mindset they were trained in and the realisations they came to on returning to the US. Cut into this were interviews with audience members including a dissenting black veteran talking with members of VVAW about why he thinks there are not many Afro-Americans in their movement.

Too often when atrocities occur, it is the soldiers that are scapegoated, when it is governments that send them out brainwashed. This film gives them a chance to put their side of the story, causing conflicting emotions- should you feel disgusted with them as murderers or pity them as young conscripts deceived into fighting, brutally trained to act like animals. Though it is grim, it is also heartening that they had the courage to stand up against their government and attempt to stop the genocidal war. The sort of film GW Bush and Blair should have watched years ago.

The Nixon administration attempted to defuse the negative political fallout of the My Lai massacre by claiming that it was a unique event and the work of a rogue outfit. Veterans who knew differently assembled in a Detroit hotel conference room in 1971 to publicly confess to the torture and massacre of civilians, and to testify that this was SOP (standard operating procedure) in a war of attrition against the Vietnamese. "Winter Soldier" is a 95-minute document of the testimony.

The simplicity of the film-making gives the content a starkness which is entirely appropriate.

This film is finally being given national distribution through Millarium Zero, thirty-three years after it was made.

Parallels with our current involvement in Iraq are unmistakable and chilling.