Winter Soldier

WITH ONE PHASE of the Vietnam War concluding, we should prepare for the deluge of books and films that will help explain it. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War offer more insight and experience than many other Indochina experts. Their testimony in Winter Soldier documents the unique brutality encouraged in young GI's by Vietnam combat and their training at home. In this war atrocities are premeditated and recurring, not isolated aberrations. Marines receive a short lesson in cruelty during their pre-embarkation pep talk, when the company officer strangles a small rabbit, skins it, and throws its carcass at his men. "You can get anything you want out of that," said one former Marine.

Once the soldier arrives in Vietnam the measure of his success is not possession of territory as in previous wars, but the number of enemy corpses. In company headquarters large blackboards listing body counts have replaced the more familiar demarcated topographic maps. To satisfy requirements of officers competing for acclaim, body counts are exaggerated either by falsifying data or by killing civilians. Sergeant Scott Camil, formerly a forward observer in Vietnam, explained: "If you killed someone they said, 'How do you know he's Viet Cong?' and the general reply would be, 'He's dead,' and that was sufficient."

Winter Soldier consists of the testimony given at the Detroit Winter Soldier Investigation in February, 1971, by 28 veterans who witnessed or participated in the immorality. The scope and nature of the accounts is appalling and strikes at the heart of any American delusions still remaining about the war. The film's effect is to force the recognition that the military aimed at the complete destruction of life and culture in Vietnam for the sake of a supposedly higher purpose--the best interests of the United States. Nothing that obstructed progress could be spared, and almost any activity of the Vietnamese people was an obstruction. Finally even the idea that the Vietnamese were human became intolerable, so the military, while physically destroying them, intellectually transformed them into animals, beasts of prey fit for disembowelment, target practice, endless incarceration, torture, and rape. "It's like someone invited you to their farm and said you can stay as long as you want, you can go hunting all you want, and have as much ammo as you want," said Sergeant Camil. "And the officers reward you for every dead body."

The story of Jack Tracey, currently Massachusetts Coordinator for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, resembles that of many other soldiers who returned from Vietnam knowing that they had become unwilling victims of the war's terror. Tracey signed up for a four-year tour of duty because otherwise he would have been drafted. After going through boot camp and training as a radio operator, a superior officer convinced him to volunteer for duty in Vietnam because the waiting list for radio operators was so long he would never be called, and his offer to go would look good when the time for promotions came around. Two months later his orders for transfer to Vietnam arrived. Lured by the prospects of higher pay, combat medals, and the chance to serve his country, he was not particularly unhappy.

His first assignment was guard duty at the Arlington Hotel, a naval office building in a populated area on the outskirts of Saigon. If anyone stopped in front of the building he was ordered to blow his whistle and shoot unless they moved away immediately. On his third night in Vietnam a woman walked past his guard post. She did not move away after he blew his whistle; he shot and killed her, South Vietnam identification papers were removed from her body, and she entered the official body statistics as an unidentified member of the Viet Cong. This was the first of two times that Tracey shot civilians from his guard post.

Many of the veterans' experiences were more excessive then Tracey's. Sergeant Camil describes how his unit trapped villagers between two railroad bridges and slaughtered them with heavy refle barrages. Another veteran admitted that his platoon followed an order to "Shoot everything that moved" in a village, and then burn it. Interrogators were perhaps most brutal of all. They threw prisoners from helicopters to make their companions talk (one lieutenant received a medal for information discovered this way), disemboweled living prisoners and then shot them, and forced confessions by burnings and beatings.

By presenting harrowing documentation Winter Soldier cuts through the conflicting and repetitions political rhetoric of the post few years, returning to the most crucial aspect of the war--the people who live and die in the midst of it. Unfortunately few Americans will see the film. Most theaters and television stations refuse to touch such controversial material. So far it has been shown in public theaters only in New York and Boston, where most of the people who saw it were probably not surprised. It deserves time on national television, certainly as much as the latest romp to the moon, but has been aired only by an educational network in New York City.

The film's poor direction will limit its exposure is much as its volatile content. Winter Soldier lacks both imagination and precision functioning at the same level of artistry as a small-town newscast. It was produced by a film collective proud to work without a director, but unfortunately no one made the essential decisions about thematic development and continuity. The interviews reach no conclusions, and convey the mood of "Meet the Press" rather than an important political meeting. Only one veteran breaks the monotony of disconnected testimony by showing the relationship between his Vietnam experiences and his current life. The interview format is also troublesome visually. A few attempts at montage, juxtaposing shots of the long-haired, dejected veteran with his photograph as a smiling, enthusiastic recruit offer the only diversion.

These artistic shortcomings will seriously limit the film's success in persuading uninformed audiences to recognize the war's horror. The uninspired presentation of the evidence is not sufficiently provocative, and the lack of visual documentation strains credulity. To be successful any film about the Vietnam War must overcome a great deal of ingrained prejudice and insensitivity in its audience. Winter Soldier attempts to do this, but fails to fully accomplish its task. We still await a film which, by combining the war's anguish and futility with outstanding cinematic form, will oblige America to confront the truth.