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Movies; "Hearts & Minds": The Saga of an Imperial Debacle

Movies; "Hearts & Minds": The Saga of an Imperial Debacle image Movies; "Hearts & Minds": The Saga of an Imperial Debacle image
Parent Issue
Day
25
Month
April
Year
1975
OCR Text

by David Goodman

"You know you let us all go off to war and said 'yea team,' you know, 'fight in Vietnam. Now 1968 comes along and 'boo team, come on home and don't say nothin' about it...You want to forget it so somebody else can go do it somewhere else. Hell no! You're going to hear it all, every day, for the rest of your life. When I get up in the morning...I have to put on an arm and a leg cause they ain't there no more, you dig. Now you do something about that. Make it all disappear, you dig...It's here and it's for real, and it 's going to happen again unless these folks get off their ass and realize it has happened, you know. "

- William Marshall, disabled American veteran

The Vietnam War - a subject which most Americans would like to forget - is again filling the front pages and the evening TV news shows. As the final chapter of U.S. intervention in Indochina rapidly draws to a close, it is now possible and necessary for us to look at the roots of this war, both in history and the national character, to see how America's role in Vietnam came to be.

"Hearts and Minds" is an emotionally powerful movie with a strong message. It comes out of the tradition of advocacy journalism and so does not strive for an image of unimpassioned "objectivity." Thus a sequence showing anguished wives and children mourning for South Vietnamese troops killed in battle is followed by General William Westmoreland straight-facedly proclaiming that "The oriental doesn't put the same high price on life (that Americans do). Life is cheap in the orient."

In "Hearts and Minds", thoughts are welded to feelings, and each serves the other. Using the documentary form, the film intersperses "action footage" with people being interviewed. Much, though not all, of the scenes in the film will be as familiar to the viewer as Huntley, Brinkley and Cronkite. Practically everyone who was around to watch television two or three years ago has seen the B-52s dropping their bomb loads, GIs firing M-16s into the brush, flattened homes and villages, the faces of the bereaved, the wounded, and those slain in battle.

Other scenes will show things that were only hinted at in the official accounts and the evenings news reports - American troops torturing prisoners, setting fire to peasants' huts, dumping their stores of rice on the ground, or hauling off old men and children to captivity as "Viet Cong suspects" in front of their terrified families.

A Vietnamese coffin-maker strengthens the sense of horror by telling about his children's deaths of poisoning by defoliants dropped from American planes. "We can't talk about it because of the (Thieu) government."

What the film does with these images, familiar and unfamiliar, is attempt to provide a coherent explanation of what the war in Vietnam really was, and how it came about.

The first major theme of "Hearts and Minds" is that the Vietnam war is not a struggle by the "South" Vietnamese people against "communist aggression" (with assistance from the U.S.), nor is it a civil war between communists and non-communists. Instead, it is a thirty year struggle for liberation of Vietnam from colonial rule.

The American role in Vietnam goes back at least as far as the late forties. At that time, France was trying to reassert its control over what had been French Indochina, following Japanese occupation during World War II. According to Clark Clifford, U.S. Secretary of Defense under President Lyndon Johnson, the United States was paying 78% of the cost of the French Army fighting the Viet Minh by 1954.

During an interview, former Arkansas Senator William Fulbright speaks of efforts by Ho Chi Minh to seek American support for his liberation movement. He relates the great tragic irony of Ho's belief that American revolutionary ideals would lead the U.S. government to support the Vietnamese people's struggle for independence from their colonial rulers.

The analogy of the Vietnam war to the American revolution is made more explicit in a scene of a re-enacted Revolutionary War battle. The guide points out that many American colonists sided with the British in the Revolutionary War. In relation to the Vietnam war, Daniel Ellsberg reminds us that in any poor country, it is possible to find those who for money or prestige will serve and fight for a colonial ruler against their own people. But without support from the common people, guerilla freedom fighters would have found it impossible to continue to wage war successfully against an enemy far more technologically advanced.

The most impressive accounts, however, come from those South Vietnamese people interviewed in the film. They speak out at great risk to their own safety (and indeed to their own lives) against the American invaders in their country.

"We fought against the Chinese for 12 centuries, against the French for 30 years, then the U.S. invaded," one Buddhist monk states. Later in the film, he continues, "Let the American people know that this is their dirtiest and longest war."

A Vietnamese Catholic priest points out the U.S.-backed Thieu regime greatly assists in spreading communism, because, in South Vietnam, anyone who advocates peace and national unity is called a communist.

In addition to talking about the nature of the war, "Hearts and Minds" spends much time examining the nature of the American personality which made it possible for the U.S. government to carry out a brutal and counter-revolutionary war in Vietnam. Randy Floyd, a former bomber pilot, relates the sense of duty and anti-communist fervor that led him to enlist to go to Vietnam. Another Vietnam veteran, a Native American, speaks of wanting to "go and kill some gooks," even though members of his own unit still referred to him as "blanket ass" and other racist epithets.

There is a classic scene from Niles,

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Movies

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Ohio, on the eve of a major football contest, "the Big Game." A minister, with members of the football team sitting in the congregation, intones, "May you be winners in the Big Game, and may you also be winners in the bigger game - the game of life.'" The competitive drive, the ideal of being "number one," whether in football or in international politics, thus goes to the heart of the popular ideology that made the Vietnam debacle possible for the United States. As Daniel Ellsberg says, "The American public was lied to (about the war) month by month by five administrations. It is a tribute to the U.S. public that these administrations felt that they had to be lied to. (But) it isn't a tribute to them that they were so easily lied to."

If the groundwork had not been there, in terms of the ideologies of national superiority and racism, the deception practiced by successive presidents would have been to no avail.

Another question which "Hearts and Minds" tries to answer is how basically humane people could engage in a war of such brutality, in which the art of killing and maiming was carried to levels never before achieved. The interviews with former U.S. pilots are most revealing to this end. According to George Coker, a former prisoner of war who was shot down over North Vietnam, "You really don't have time for personal thought when you're flying around up there."

"It was very much of a technical expertise thing," comments Randy Floyd, another former pilot. He says that he never thought of the effects of what he was doing, of the suffering he was causing. "When I think about my children, I don't know what I would do if someone napalmed them," he states, bends his head and softly cries.

Had it not been for the extremely opportune although accidental release of this movie at the moment when the U.S.-backed dictatorships in Indochina are rapidly collapsing, as well as "Hearts and Minds" receipt of the Academy Award for best documentary, it might have languished in obscurity. Columbia Pictures, the original distributor for the film, backed off from handling the film because of its controversial nature. After several months in limbo, producers Bert Schneider and Peter Davis managed to arrange distribution through Warner Brothers.

Briarwood theaters have already sent "Hearts and Minds" on its way, but the film will certainly make several returns to Ann Arbor, brought by one of the campus film groups. Everyone should make a point of seeing the flick when it next plays here. If we forget the lesson of Vietnam, it will happen again.

 

"Some people say we're fighting for the wrong side in Vietnam. We aren't on the wrong side. We are the wrong side."
-Daniel Ellsberg