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The Mythology Continues

By Joe Miller (Reviewer)

"Vietnam: Soldiers' Stories"
A documentary from WILL-TV
(PBS station at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Producer: Tim Hartin
Co-Producers: David Inge and Carol Forsythe
Color/55 minutes

Thirteen Illinois and Indiana Vietnam veterans, men and women, reflect on their war experiences in this moving film, and the diversity of experiences and responses to the war on the ground come through in a powerful way. The producers should have left the reminiscences to the war itself, to the time in and around Vietnam. This would have resulted in a strong enough commentary on what that war did to Vietnamese and Americans alike.

However, Hartin, Inge, and Forsythe ventured into the mine-filled territory of Vietnam veterans and the anti-war movement. As a result of their approach to this controversial topic, in the opinion of this reviewer, they undermined the whole project. Thus, they have contributed one more unfortunate example of attempts to whitewash the true history of the anti-war movement and the central role played by veterans in that movement.

As far as the producers are concerned, there was no anti-war veterans' movement. In their view, based upon the selected segments of interviews, GIs and veterans had nothing but hatred for the anti-war movement, feeling, for example, that young people who died at the hands of the Ohio National Guard at Kent State in 1970 "got what was coming to them."

Two of the interviewees included VVAW member Paul Wisovaty of Tuscola, Illinois, and Barry Romo, who served as an infantry lieutenant in Vietnam during 1967-1968 and is currently a National Co-Coordinator. Viewers never hear Romo's discussion of the close connection between active duty GIs, war veterans and the peace movement in this country. He does not get to tell how nearly 50,000 Vietnam veterans came home from our war to join VVAW and work with a welcoming peace movement to end the destruction of Vietnam and its people and to bring US troops home alive and well.

Instead we are presented with footage of hippies, Yippies, and the Chicago police riot in August of 1968, along with a voice-over that gives no clue to the fact that, according to the FBI, nearly 500 members of VVAW were also in the streets in Chicago protesting the war and the sham convention taking place at that time. There is no discussion of the nearly 3,000 GIs who joined VVAW while still serving in Vietnam in 1971.

This film adds to the revision of history, begun under the Reagan administration, that claims there were no anti-war GIs or veterans, there was no resistance movement in the field that effectively limited the ability of the Nixon administration to continue the war on the ground. As VVAW members and supporters know, this flies in the face of historical fact, and it feeds the ignorance among the general population, especially young people, about the real resistance among war veterans and active-duty GIs to the war against the Vietnamese people.

Citizens should beware of so-called "documentaries" like this that claim to present "soldiers' stories" from the Vietnam era without including the stories of tens of thousands of us who came home, were embraced by the peace movement, and worked for years under serious government threats and overt repression to help end that war.
Too bad. It could have been a better film.