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 \u201cdocu-drama\u201d 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\u00a0makes this a need-to-be-seen film.<\/p>\n
Over the past week I\u2019ve been telling friends and acquaintances about the film and what I learned, but was not surprised, from it. \u00a0They didn\u2019t know these things, either. I don\u2019t think telling of those parts here will be spoiling the film for you.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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. \u00a0Thus she truly aided the enemy.<\/p>\n
I did not know that she and Donald Sutherland, with others who I did not recognize, had a \u201croad show\u201d which \u201ctoured\u201d to various war protest rallies, I guess. In this show, they ridiculed the actions of our warriors. Unfortunately, Sutherland\u2019s delivery was very good. I wonder how his son, Kiefer, came to play Jack Bauer on 24. <\/em><\/p>\n 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\u2019s statements of seeing no such actions after 18 months in country. Bald face lies on Kerry\u2019s part. How did he ever become Secretary of State? Oh, yeah: \u201cWe\u201d wanted someone ineffectual.<\/p>\n There is commentary provided by former and retired Marines, including COL Gerry Turley, which is on par with the vintage footage for revelations.<\/p>\n Turley tells of the Viet Cong\u2019s \u201cArmed Propaganda Teams\u201d violating cease fire agreements during Tet to \u201cwin\u201d the hearts and minds of villagers in the south. Win they did by slaughtering and mutilating village leaders.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t slaughter people all at once (maybe they did but we didn\u2019t\/haven\u2019t heard of it) but they did send one million people to re-education camps, where many died. \u00a0We know that two million boat people did escape and maybe that about a quarter million perished trying. The Vietnamese in this country are<\/strong> very grateful. Make no mistake.<\/p>\n All the Vietnamese characters are played by Vietnamese refugees. Learning this reminded me of watching Good Morning Vietnam<\/em> 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: \u201cWhy do they use Chinese actors?!\u201d and \u201cWhy do they always make the communists look like the good guys?\u201d<\/p>\n Why indeed?<\/p>\n 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 \u201cdocu-drama\u201d 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\u00a0makes this a need-to-be-seen film.<\/p>\n <\/i> <\/a> <\/i> <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2452,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2452"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=453"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":470,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453\/revisions\/470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}