VIETNAM REFLECTIONS

September 8, 1999
		Essayist Anne Taylor Fleming talks about two new documentaries about Vietnam.

Online NewsHour Special Report: Remembering Vietnam NewsHour Archives Reflections on the War Recent Headlines     March 23, 2000: Secretary of Defense Cohen discusses his trip to Vietnam. Aug. 9, 1999: A discussion of trade with the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam. May 15, 1997: Normalizing relations with Vietnam. Browse the NewsHour's coverage of Asia.   PBS/The American Experience: Vietnam PBS/POV: RE:Vietnam U.S. State Department	ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: We've had World War II again in books and heroic Technicolor, uplifting if painful to see it again, all those brave young men dying before their time. It is far harder when Vietnam comes back because that is a war that continues to niggle at the country's soul, to cast its long, complicated shadow over our hearts, minds and foreign policy -- all those lives lost there, their names etched on that shiny, dark wall in Washington. Should they not have been there? Should we have stayed out? Did we do things there for which we will always bear shame? These questions are at the heart and soul of much national debate -- as they are at the heart and soul of two new documentaries that revisit Vietnam from new and arresting and equally painful angles. While both documentaries assiduously avoid politics, they nonetheless leave you uncomfortable, questioning, and deeply disturbed about the nature of that war. One, "Return With Honor," is-- on the surface anyway-- a patriotic testimonial to the American prisoners of war, some of whom languished in Vietnamese jails-- or rather torture chambers-- for the better part of a decade, the 1960's to the 1970's. To watch their square-jawed, forthright faces as they tell of what they endured is alarming, engaging, infuriating. FORMER POW: We called it the Vietnamese rope trick. And that was to take your arms around your back, tie your hands together-- tie them up real tight-- and then rotate your arms behind and over your shoulder until your shoulders dislocate. Well, this one was already broken and dislocated so that was easy. And I remember this one starting over the top and I can remember the cracking and breaking and my elbow also dislocated. I was in terrible pain, trying to scream, wishing I could die. ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: You are left shifting in your seat, a wealth of emotions running this way and that through your soul and psyche. How could this happen? How could people do this to each other; maim and wound and beat, shock and shackle? And by what resources of pride and patriotism and stubbornness and character and companionship do men survive these things? FORMER POW: You get isolated; that's when the trouble begins. And you can't do that. You have to communicate at virtually any cost. If you get caught and tortured for awhile, that's just the overhead, but you do it anyway. ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: You can't help feeling admiration for the survivors and rage at the torturers, whatever your underlying feelings about the war. You can't help but choke up when the men careen garrulously through their tales of survival and when they return to a hero's welcome. Okay. Well done. They acquitted themselves bravely and honorably, regardless of the rightness or wrongs of the war. FORMER POW: All we had left of what we were is our name and honor. And I don't know if that makes any sense the way I'm trying to describe this or not, but that's just all you have left and you won't give it up.
	"Regret to Inform"
	ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: But on other movie screens there is another Vietnam documentary, "Regret to Inform," this one from a female point of view, the filmmaker having lost her own husband in the war. FILMMAKER: The same unanswered questions that drew me to Vietnam made me want to meet other women who had lost their husbands as I had. Maybe by hearing their stories I could understand my own more deeply. ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: This film leaves you quietly devastated. For here are the widows of that war, American and Vietnamese. Hopeful, young brides when the war began, their worlds were shattered by early loss, and even more, by their lingering sense that the men they loved saw and did things that violated their own sense of decency. WOMAN: I only received three letters, and he said that he didn't really want to say anything about what was going on. He didn't want to depress me or worry me. And so he said he would just try to tell me how he was doing, how the weather was. That's all he would write. He said he wouldn't write about anything else. I don't know what he meant but he must have meant something because that's what it said. And I often wondered about that. I often wondered about what did he have to do. ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: This then is a more negative view of the war. The dark heart of it is not the American widows but the Vietnamese women, who endured precisely the same kinds of treatment the POW's did. VIETNAMESE WOMAN: (speaking through interpreter) The Americans ambushed and captured me and handed me over to the South Vietnamese army. They tortured me mercilessly. They hung me upside down from the ceiling by my ankles, and tied my big toes to a pole. They passed electrodes through the tips of each of my fingers and through both my nipples. The cruelty that we experienced was longer than a river, higher than a mountain, deeper than an ocean. ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: Or they lay down with American soldiers, modest teenagers who learned to strip down and turn tricks to stay alive. SECOND VIETNAMESE WOMAN: Sometime I slept with four or five guy a night. Sometime the guy have sex with me, sometime he just want to smoke marijuana with me. Sometime he just yell or cry, sometime the soldier hit me. And beside I do lots of marijuana to numb myself because without marijuana or drugs I don't think I can take my clothes off in front of a man that I just met. For a long time, I think I'm a bad person, but in my heart I know I am a good person. I wouldn't do the things that I did if I have another choice. ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: They were enduring this while, in their dungeons, the American POW's were enduring their abuse, the grizzly yin and yang. You leave these films exhausted on some level, bereft. My guess is that you don't leave with your fundamental viewpoint on the war shifted, but widened perhaps, filled out. You leave, too, with the sense, that this war will never leave us completely alone. Perhaps that's not a bad thing. FILMMAKER: So this is the place. After years of imagining it, it's so ordinary. This is where you died, Jeff, so scared, so young, so far away from home. Who else died here that day? ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: A quarter century later, it still holds a mirror to our soul. I'm Anne Taylor Fleming.