Eight documentaries, made between 1967 and the present, together compose a fuller account of the Vietnam War than any single film could offer. Their makers — a French combat veteran, an American polemicist, a Dutch essayist, the editors of a Hollywood-financed elegy — proceed from incompatible premises and arrive at incompatible conclusions. Two reach back before American intervention, to the French colonial war and the politics that produced it. One confronts the statesman who directed the escalation. Three remain at the level of the infantry. One examines the appetite for killing; another, a single massacre; the last weighs the war against the society that waged it. Read in concert, they trace the conflict from its colonial origins to the moral reckoning that outlived the fighting.
Indochine, the Forgotten War 1946–1954 — the antecedent
A French chronicle of the First Indochina War, the campaign its title concedes has slipped from memory. It begins in 1945, with France’s attempt to reclaim its colony from the communist-led Viet Minh of Ho Chi Minh, and proceeds through the expeditionary corps’ years of inconclusive warfare, the elimination of rival factions such as the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai, and the gradual withdrawal into besieged deltas that culminated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The American films presuppose this history without explaining it. Here it is set out in full: the war the United States inherited was already, in its essentials, a colonial defeat.
In the Year of the Pig — the indictment
Emile de Antonio assembled the film in 1968, while the war continued, and its exhibition drew bomb threats. It dispenses with narration altogether, juxtaposing archival footage with testimony from those who knew the terrain — among them the historians Jean Lacouture and Paul Mus — so that the argument emerges from the arrangement itself: that the conflict descended directly from French colonialism and the repressive Saigon government of Ngo Dinh Diem. The work is not reportage but advocacy, a case for the prosecution advanced before the verdict of history was known. That contemporaneous conviction is its singular contribution.
The Fog of War — the architect
Errol Morris’s portrait of Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, is organised as eleven lessons and underscored by Philip Glass. Now in his eighties, McNamara reconstructs the reasoning of his career: the statistical bombing campaigns he refined under Curtis LeMay during the Second World War, and the commitment of some 400,000 American troops to a war whose conclusion he could not foresee. The viewer observes a formidable administrative intelligence recounting its gravest error and stopping just short of contrition. No other film in the group ascends to this level of command. It records the war as its principal architects understood it, belatedly.
The Anderson Platoon — the patrol
Pierre Schoendoerffer, who had served as a French army cameraman and been taken prisoner at Dien Bien Phu, returned to Vietnam to spend six weeks with the platoon of Lieutenant Joseph B. Anderson during Operation Irving in 1966. Anderson — twenty-four years old, African American, a graduate of West Point — leads thirty-three men whom the film observes without commentary: a transistor radio playing Nancy Sinatra, a chaplain’s service before an assault, a soldier’s quiet request that, should he not survive, he be wished luck. Its contribution is texture, the ordinary duration of infantry life, recorded by a man who understood precisely what awaited them.
Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam — the testimony
Bill Couturié constructed the film entirely from letters written home by American servicemen, voiced by some forty actors — among them Robert De Niro, Sean Penn, the Sheens and Robin Williams — over television news footage and the soldiers’ own home movies. The correspondence progresses from bravado to apprehension, concluding with a muted repatriation at Clark Air Base, without ceremony or welcome. Where the other films gather the recollections of survivors, this one preserves the words the men set down at the time, addressed to parents and sweethearts, before the outcome was known to them.
First Kill — the appetite
Coco Schrijber’s Dutch documentary addresses the question the others decline: that killing may be experienced as exhilaration. Her veterans speak of it without evasion, describing an adrenaline so intense that nothing else registered; she places their testimony beside the writer Michael Herr, author of Dispatches, and the photographer Eddie Adams, each preoccupied with the same disquieting fascination. Interspersed are images of tourists who now traverse the former battlefields. Alone among these films, it acknowledges the war as an object of attraction for some who fought it, and interrogates the impulse that draws others to look.
The Ghost of My Lai — the atrocity
The film confronts the massacre committed at My Lai in March 1968. It proceeds from the colour photographs taken that day by an Army cameraman on his personal camera — depicting civilians killed irrespective of age — and traces responsibility through Charlie Company to Lieutenant William Calley, convicted of murder, his sentence subsequently reduced to ten years and his release secured soon afterward. Following the patrols, the letters and the confessions of appetite, it marks the point at which those forces issued in atrocity, and dwells upon the meagre accounting that followed.
Hearts and Minds — the reckoning
Peter Davis’s film, awarded the Academy Award for Best Documentary of 1974, proceeds almost wholly by juxtaposition. General William Westmoreland observes that the Oriental does not place a high value upon life; Davis cuts to a Vietnamese woman lowering herself into her husband’s grave. The repatriated prisoner of war George Coker is received as a hero in Linden, New Jersey, while elsewhere veterans return to dishonourable discharges and imprisonment. The verdict is never pronounced; it is delivered through the editing. The film supplies the domestic reckoning, setting the convictions that sustained the war against its actual consequences.
Considered as a whole, the eight films compose a continuous account. Indochine surrenders a defeat France had already sustained; In the Year of the Pig prosecutes the war as it was being fought; The Fog of War returns to the Secretary of Defense for his retrospective doubt; The Anderson Platoon and Dear America remain with the soldiers, in the field and in their correspondence; First Kill concedes the exhilaration few would acknowledge; The Ghost of My Lai reckons the cost at My Lai and the impunity that followed; and Hearts and Minds arraigns the conscience of the nation itself. No single film constitutes the history of the Vietnam War. Set in argument against one another, the eight approach it.
