By production standards, this is not a very good movie. It was privately funded by not terribly rich, non-Hollywood-types so the budget was small. It was shot in HD, which helps but the acting and directing are not stellar. Done as a “docu-drama” that may have benefited from more documentary and less re-enactment. It is the commentary of former and retired Marines and actual footage from the 70s that makes this a need-to-be-seen film.
Over the past week I’ve been telling friends and acquaintances about the film and what I learned, but was not surprised, from it. They didn’t know these things, either. I don’t think telling of those parts here will be spoiling the film for you.
Vintage footage of Jane Fonda sealed the deal for me on her being a traitor. Most of the country, including those younger than me, knows about her cavorting with the enemy in Hanoi. What I didn’t know of was her going on the talk show circuit saying that our POWs were not being tortured and that they were being treated better than any POWs anywhere at any time. She implored us to stop writing letters to Hanoi asking for fair treatment and release of our men. Thus she truly aided the enemy.
I did not know that she and Donald Sutherland, with others who I did not recognize, had a “road show” which “toured” to various war protest rallies, I guess. In this show, they ridiculed the actions of our warriors. Unfortunately, Sutherland’s delivery was very good. I wonder how his son, Kiefer, came to play Jack Bauer on 24.
There is footage of John Kerry attempting to defend his statements about atrocities, performed by our troops, which he witnessed during his three months in country. Here he is up against a true warrior’s statements of seeing no such actions after 18 months in country. Bald face lies on Kerry’s part. How did he ever become Secretary of State? Oh, yeah: “We” wanted someone ineffectual.
There is commentary provided by former and retired Marines, including COL Gerry Turley, which is on par with the vintage footage for revelations.
Turley tells of the Viet Cong’s “Armed Propaganda Teams” violating cease fire agreements during Tet to “win” the hearts and minds of villagers in the south. Win they did by slaughtering and mutilating village leaders.
The American public was lead to believe that less blood would be shed if we just withdrew and let the communists take over, peacefully. Maybe the communists didn’t slaughter people all at once (maybe they did but we didn’t/haven’t heard of it) but they did send one million people to re-education camps, where many died. We know that two million boat people did escape and maybe that about a quarter million perished trying. The Vietnamese in this country are very grateful. Make no mistake.
All the Vietnamese characters are played by Vietnamese refugees. Learning this reminded me of watching Good Morning Vietnam in the dorm during PT school. One of my dorm mates was Vietnamese. I now realize that it must have been very hard for her to watch that movie. She made two comments while we watched it: “Why do they use Chinese actors?!” and “Why do they always make the communists look like the good guys?”
Why indeed?
Makes me want to see this even more…
I guess the fascinating part is the continued myth that seems SO hard to destroy. It is that we LOST! We did no such thing.
Interestingly, while the sense was that the gooks were losing in the areas you were in, the media had an unrelenting message of how all this was so useless. The VC were loved and winning. Sure.
There were, indeed, VC villages. I never quite figured out why, but we knew which and even set them up from time to time to take out the bad actors. Hammer-and-anvil type actions. Sometimes they worked, sometimes not. But overall, they were losing.
One way you knew was that by 1970 the NVA you found were often 14 y/o kids, not the old hardened soldiers of before. Khe San was not surrounded by kids.
Little by little, story by story, the lies told are becoming unravelled. Cronkite was one incredible liar. Very little he said was truth. Had he, or the media in general, reported on WWII the way he and it reported on the Vietnam war, we would have lost.
Yet despite him, we still beat the hecl out of them.
“We Didn’t Lose – We Left” (on my license plate holder)
Thanks for the write-up–sorry I got to it so late.
Yes, yes, & hell yes. Mr. Devereaux–even worse than abandoning victory was the long campaign of lies told wherever they could be told.
If it happened that Americans no longer cared or lost their minds, well, politics also means sometimes people do not do the right thing, even if it’s in their interest or not contrary to interest. But to have been lied to so well is something else.
Somehow, anti-war hysteria became a big part of American politics. It doesn’t look like anyone at the time saw it coming or how to deal with it…