Winter Soldier

Less a documentary than a piece of living history, Winter Soldier records for posterity a gathering of 150 Vietnam veterans at a Howard Johnson's motel in 1971 Detroit. As the war continued to rage overseas, these ex-soldiers gathered to discuss their experiences in combat and in training publicly, many for the first time, in a press conference format. Their stories - full of harrowing firefights, shameful massacres, gruesome mutilations and countless other atrocities - leaves their audience shocked and the soldiers stricken and haunted. This is one of the single most difficult films I have ever had to watch and one that's staggeringly important now that America has involed itself in another bloody and extended overseas conflict.

John Kerry appears briefly, interviewing fellow soldiers about their experiences in Vietnam, but otherwise these men are anonymous voices from the past, recalling how the government gave them a uniform and a gun and taught them how to kill without consideration, without remorse, without compassion and without humanity.



Sporadic footage of Vietnam is interspersed with a variety of anecdotes. One soldier recalls seeing his drill instructor, on the final day before shipping out to Southeast Asia, skin and disembowel a live rabbit before flinging its organs over the grunts. Later on, in country, the soldier will see a colleague perform the same ritual on a Vietnamese woman.

Many others corroborate these kinds of stories, suggesting a pre-planned pattern of wanton cruelty and sadistic violence designed by the American military or its civilian leadership to wear down the Communist's resolve. Even if there was no agreed-upon campaign of terror executed on the Vietnamese people, there was certainly a decision made at some point to look the other way while individual soldiers and even officers violate every single tenet of the Geneva Convention, and even common decency.

Though the witnesses differ in race, age, background and even in their level of anger at their government and leadership, the same concepts and subtexts keep popping up in their anecdotes.

Their training has been designed to dehumanize their reactions and surpress their humanity. A Vietnamese person, civilian or soldier, is not a human. Just a gook, an animal you don't have to feel bad about torturing or raping or burning or tossing out of a helicopter mid-flight.

Perhaps most interesting to me, particularly in light of my recent blog post about the importance of Symoblic War over actual war to Americans, was the way in which soldiers were encouraged to fudge the facts in order to make their ugly work seem vital. Sgt. Scott Camil observes that any dead Vietnamese person, regardless of how they were killed or who they were, was counted as Viet Cong.

"How do you know he was VC?," Camil was asked. "Because he's dead," he would reply. And then they would share a laugh.

Similarly, because success in the war was gauged in terms of body counts rather than territory gained, casualty numbers were forged or fabricated. If 20 Americans died, they would report that 100 VC were killed, just to make it seem like a successful operation.

Obviously, over time, this would drive a man insane. Each day you are marched into the jungle and ordered to kill, but your actions seem to have no consequences. No new information is gained, because you're mainly torturing peasants and farmers. The Viet Cong army still shows up periodically and kills your friends because they know the territory and hide out in the trees. Each day it's just more and more senseless, meaningless horror, and it has left many of these men visibly shaken permanently.

Most of the veterans in the film share that far-off, distant, cold stare that only men who have served seem to develop. One soldier describes having completely forgotten about an incident in which he and some colleagues stoned a young boy to death for fun until years later, when the memory suddenly came to him and left him horrified. Another soldier holds up a photograph of himself grinning while pointing to the dead body of a Vietnamese man. (Sound familiar?)

Watching Winter Soldier in 2006 doesn't just invite comparisons to the present-day conflict. It demands comparison. Many facets of the stories of these soldiers link up with extraordinary presience to the stories you occasionally hear back (but not nearly enough) from the media about the Iraq War. The confused troops in the field, their hands tied by beurocrats and their mission unclear, stumble around and make mistakes and kill innocents. The use of torture as an interrogation technique turns the local population against Americans and severely harms the psyche of the torturers permanently. And of course, as soldiers wind up staying in the war zone for longer and longer periods, their mental states become more and more erratic, unpredictable and quite frankly frightening. What effect does a year or two of constant carnage have on a human being? Is there any hope of returning to the man (or woman) you once were before the killing started?

Winter Soldier would seem to suggest that, no, you can't ever really go back. Most of the men in this movie speak about war as if it was a dream from which they have awoken. Those men in the pictures, killing babies and burning down huts while they're still occupied and trading in detached ears for beers at the local bar, those aren't really them. Their actual identities went into hibernation, allowing the U.S. Government to use them as killing machines in the jungle for a few years.

One soldier makes a statement that essentially sums up the entire film. "This war," he says, "doesn't just ruin the lives of the people who died. It ruins an entire generation. An entire generation of Americans and Vietnamese, ruined, and that's the real tragedy here."

And he's right. Because it only takes a few bastards in high places to make the decisions that cause wars, but it takes an entire nation of people to carry those wars out. Soldiers and their families who never recover from the strain and trauma along with all the other people whose lives they touch. Of course, the people of Vietnam, who have spent the past 30 some odd years trying to recover from the psychic and environmental and generational horror of the 60's and 70's. And there's this notion that the entire world has been polluted by this kind of evil, as well. Not just from chemical weapons tossed into the skies, but from the villainy of a massive army determined to wipe out its perceived enemies at the cost of its own soul.

Of course, some people don't think raping women and then skinning them alive is a big deal.

From Powerline's Paul Mirengoff:

Tananto takes the analysis one step further when he points to the similarity of Murtha's "they were depraved because they were deployed" meme and the line that John Kerry peddled (based in large part on false allegations of war crimes) with respect to the war in Vietnam.

[U.S. Representative and Vietnam Vet John] Murtha is what Kerry once was -- a darling of the Democrats by virtue of his ability to attack our military efforts under cover of his credentials. But all of the credentials in the world don't help when you contradict yourself in a single sentence.

Paul doesn't think the government training you to kill and then dropping you in the jungle or the desert and ordering you to kill has any affect on your psyche. Naturally! It's like that old NRA slogan: Governments don't kill people, soldiers do!

Also, "false allegations of war crimes"? He's suggesting all the soldiers in Winter Soldier are making this stuff up? They're some pretty amazing actors. De Niro's got nothing on these guys in the "strangely intense, deeply sad Vietnam vet" competition.

After Paul's comments, John Hinderaker adds:

Murtha is a disgrace. If there is one Congressman who deserves to be defeated in November, it's him.

Yeah, so what if he was there and has a history of being pro-military? What does he know? Paul read somewhere that the soldiers were all making up those atrocities anyway! My Lai? More like one too many mai tais! BWAHAHAHA!

Winter Soldier comes to DVD on May 30th. It will mark the first time the film has ever actually been released for public consumption since it was filmed by various New York documentarians (including Harlan County USA director Barbara Kopple) and screened sporadically throughout 1972. Order the DVD or learn more about the film here. Or come buy it at Laser Blazer in two weeks!