Winter Soldier

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.

This film is a documentary shot at a Howard Johnson motel in Detroit over 3 days, in February, 1971, when 125 Vietnam military veterans gathered to offer personal testimony about atrocities and gratuitous violence they had witnessed or participated in during military service in Vietnam, i.e., violent acts by U.S. servicemen and U.S.-paid civilian mercenaries during the Vietnam conflict. The gathering was called the "Winter Soldier Investigation" and was the first such public testimony ever to have occurred in connection with the Vietnam war.

As one critic noted at the time, the film is more a document than a documentary. Technically it is dull: for the most part a single stationary camera records one speaker after another, C-SPAN style. But the stories here are told with chilling detail and emotion, or, equally moving, lack of emotion, after the fashion of many former combatants who suffer from PTSD and avoid re-experiencing the overwhelming feelings that their trauma mobilized originally, through suppression or dissociation from awareness. Among many others, there is a brief scene depicting a young John Kerry at the meeting.

The film was later shown at a Congressional hearing in 1972. It has never received wide distribution in the ensuing decades. Yet there is obvious resonance of the stories told here with concerns today about state-sponsored torture (Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib) and gratuitous killing and wounding of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The directing group (the "collective") was made up of 18 young documentarists based in New York City, including Barbara Kopple. This was a co-production of the Winter Film Collective and Vietnam Veterans Against the War. My ratings: cinema values: 5/10 (C); significance of content: 8/10 (B+). (Seen on 11/15/05). If you'd like to read more of my reviews, send me a message for directions to my websites.

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.

This film appears to have been all but lost to the ages, which is a shame since its a very moving record of what a group of soldiers experienced during their time in Viet Nam.

The film consists of panel testimony before and to an audience of the horrible things that the soldiers saw and did while fighting for truth justice and the American Way. That is inter-cut with one on one interviews with the film makers. Its mostly just talking heads, but its rarely boring since what these men have to say is so interesting it ends up being more like talking to friends over coffee than being lectured.

What comes through is the sincerity of the speakers who pull no punches in telling you what its like to fight a war in a hostile land of no clear cut enemies. (And yes the film echoes frighteningly with events currently transpiring in Iraq where reports on the news and interviews with soldiers find the same phrases and reasonings being repeated)

This is a haunting film that effects you not so much in the viewing, but rather in the thinking. It is not an easy film to forget and it will play in your mind much more forcefully as you think about it afterward.

If the film has any real flaw is that at 95 minutes its about 20 minutes too long. Its not that the material is bad, rather that its too much to take in and like the vet who's seen too many killings you turn off to the sights before you.

SEE THIS MOVIE. Find it and see it. It is still as vital today as when it was made.

9 out of 10.