Winter Soldier

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.

In 1971,a group of enlisted men,back from a tour of duty in Viet Nam, went to Washington & testified as to what horrors they carried out while on duty (and after which,they threw their conduct medals on the lawn of the White House,in protest of America's invasion of South East Asia). The hours of testimony was filmed in black & white,16mm in what looked like what was shot (potentially)for newsreel format (i.e.raw,primal,do it yourself),by unknown sources (on screen credits are unlisted,outside of the film's title). The film was intended for air on television,but was yanked & never even saw any kind of distribution (at that time,anyway). I'm guessing it was the same geniuses that got Francine Parker's 'F.T.A.' yanked that same year. Years later,with the war in Iraq at the centre of controversy (and the downfall of George W. Bush's popularity,among other things),the original 16mm footage of 'Winter Soldier' was found,re-printed on 35mm film stock (with additional 16mm colour footage,shot at various battlefields at the time,also blown up to 35mm),and given distribution as an independently released documentary. What we see/hear is the raw,unvarnished truth of the various soldiers (including to be,future Presidential hopeful,John Kerry of Massachusetts) pouring their hearts out at what they were forced to do,under military pressure,that would/should reduce anybody who considers themselves as human,to tears (I know I did). This is not an easy film to watch,but an important film for anybody who is an advocate for world peace,anti war activist,or human rights advocate. Not rated by the MPAA,but contains horrific testimony of human rights violations & strong language. Not for young children

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.

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.

Probably the most self-critical Vietnam-related film to have been made in the U.S. (which might explain its scarcity), WINTER SOLDIER is a frequently moving and disturbing documentary about the inculcation of eager, pliable young American men, of a conscienceless barbarism. The fact that the panel of 'Nam vets, convened in front of spectators and a camera crew to convey their opposition to the war, is made up predominantly of articulate, sensitive-seeming men may point to why these particular people broke free of the bonds of pleasure-killing faceless innocent civilians ("gooks"), and came to realize the profound inhumanity of their and their peers' actions and, far worse, the actions of the U.S. military in creating them.

Unlike the callousness of the soldiers interviewed in documentaries like INTERVIEWS WITH MY LAI VETERANS and MILLS OF THE GODS, these speakers appear ashamed, penitent, and destined to spend the rest of their days with horrible memories of the torture and massacres they took part in, as well as anger at a government that made them pawns, not only in an imperialistic gambit disguised as a mercy mission, but also in a morality-play tug-of-war back home.