In honor of my new facebook friend, Scott Camil heres my recent review of the Vietnam era film: Winter Soldier: Winter Soldier (1972) imdb/title/tt0204058/ A film directed by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. “Pray for war. Pray for war. God bless the U.S. marine corps.” - as quoted by a soldier in the film Winter Soldier. Winter Soldier is not your latest Captain America movie. It is certainly not a movie to use for recruitment to the armed services. I cannot recall any nonfiction film like it on the Vietnam War, and its closest kin may be the much more sanitized in comparison Band of Brothers and The Pacific documentaries that coincided with their HBO miniseries releases. Winter Soldier gets its title from being the alternative to what Thomas Paine called in 1776, “the summer soldier,” or a soldier who flees when the going gets rough. Winter Soldier is the soldier that stays, goes through hell, and lives to tell about it. It is that rare film on the list that is probably the least known of its genre but carries the biggest bang. Unlike films such as Platoon, which dramatize and show you the stories of the grunts and survival in jungle warfare, Winter Soldier is the soldiers themselves telling you the stories of what they did to survive. The words are spoken in a matter of fact tone with a mike in front of them and a soldierly lid on the emotion brewing underneath. Most Americans will not be familiar with this directness in a film. Even at the time of the filming of Winter Soldier, one of the soldiers laments the divide between the everyday man going to work and “having to buy antifreeze for his car”, with his lack of consideration that his government was in the meantime sending the neighbor boys off to Vietnam to die. And this may be the integral point of the whole film. American familiarity with their wars comes from fictionalized tales of nonfictional events such as the movies, augmented by an educational and political system that puts America at the pinnacle of exceptionalism. Occasionally, a book or two rises to the surface, such as Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, or William Manchester’s Goodbye, Darkness, that give a much starker contrast to the accepted war narrative. The soldiers in this film are speaking directly to the American public about that false narrative. They are looking for listeners. They are well versed in the American culture that spoon feeds a sanitized version of events, for they took from the same cups in their youth. Rare are these episodes of history where we hear from the soldiers themselves on their experiences, and even more so in those soldiers that decide to go further and do more than just talk about it. For the Winter Soldiers, they want to see Vietnam stopped and not repeated. The film is a time capsule of the early seventies, shot in black and white due to cost constraints on the directors, with all the jargon, dress, and public smoking common to the period. The focus is immediately on the soldiers as they are asked by the filmmakers for their name, rank, time of service, and to elaborate on what they saw and what they did. And it isn’t long before the viewer is pulled into the first hand atrocities of war. Women villagers raped by American soldiers. Children shot for sport. Soldiers and companies fighting over who killed what “gook” and who killed the most. The burning of villages and killing of its inhabitants for the only reason that the war was not a, “war for land but a war for numbers.” One of the more heinous acts of choice seemed to be throwing prisoners out of helicopters to get the others to talk, or simply because they could. Others plundered bodies for trophies and took ears from the dead to leave a message to the enemy and to prove their manhood in the bush. This is a harrowing vision of a soldier’s life in Vietnam, and many of the speakers are marines. The atrocities spoken of, such as the killing of children on a whim for showing the middle finger, are corroborated by other soldiers. And though these handful of men are few compared to all the active duty participants in Vietnam, it is not long before the preponderance of the stories leads one to conclude that clearly some very bad things happened. At about the one hour mark, the film digressed into discussions on racism, its one weak point that should’ve been saved for a different feature. One African American speaker chastised a white soldier for missing what he felt was the obvious underpinning of the war: racism. The speaker spent a few minutes comparing the plight of the black man in America to the Vietnamese and the American Indian. Following this, an American Indian made the same analogy that the Vietnamese are simply facing the crimes and genocide that the American Indian faced hundred years ago. Placing the Vietnam War into a broader picture of a continual type of racism was thought provoking, but distracted from the strength of the film. Letting soldiers tell their stories from the field in stark memory was a guilty sort of pleasure. I wanted to hear more though it pained me to do so. There is not much need for directing in this film, and the direction was once listed as “anonymous” in film festivals. The men and women that did work the cameras give us a sense that this is hallowed ground. The camera is pointed and the soldiers speak with little interruption. One soldier in particular garners much attention. His name is Scott Camil and he spent two tours in Vietnam, rising from private first class to sergeant. In fact, this version of the DVD was packed with a bonus feature specifically on the further actions taken by Mr. Camil since the filming of the Winter Soldier. Mr. Camil is spellbinding when he talks. He is well-versed in punctuating his words and in telling a story of horror with limited emotion. He cannot be easily dismissed. His features are of the stereotypical hippy with the wild hair but his verbiage is sound and fury. He leads the viewers from his time in boot camp at Parris Island and getting two teeth knocked out by drill sergeants; going to Vietnam and living with the asinine rule of not being allowed to carry a loaded weapon at his post; and, finally succumbing to killing as the means to stay alive. As Mr. Camil described it, his first real action came during a major nighttime breach of the camp he was stationed in. Having decided not to wait and ask for authority to shoot, he saw the enemy and he killed them. He survived the long night and ventured out of his dugout in the morning, only to find the faces of five of his dead friends. From that point on, any Vietnamese was a threat whether friend or foe. He recounts stories of passive killings in the field, running down and killing a small detachment of men by himself, and waiting in ambush for passing Vietcong, all for which he was rewarded (and later through away his medals). He was such a dedicated marine, a true believer in the cause, that he volunteered for a second tour of duty. Mr. Camil is a good example of many of these young soldiers and marines. They went in with strapping good looks, clean cut, trained, and ready to kill. They came out demoralized and looking for answers by telling their stories. On one occasion, Mr. Camil recounts being put on the spot by a woman from the audience. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” she asked. “Don’t you know how upset we are with you?” He turned it around on her, a woman twice his own age, and blamed her for sending him to Vietnam at the age of 19, “because she was a crummy voter.” There are no real answers to Winter Solder and one leaves the film wondering what caused such a massive breakdown in authority and whether the modern army has distanced itself from such heinous practices in the field. One soldier said, “the key to growing is talking to people who are different, not to those who are the same.” A sentiment not supported by his superiors in the field of Vietnam. Another soldier says what many are afraid to speak, of not wanting to admit, “that all those men got killed for nothing.” If anything, Winter Soldier tries to give the American citizen an honest, no holds barred look at what real war is like. And once you’re in it, how decision makers will do anything, say anything, sacrifice anyone, to ensure that truth outside of the accepted American norms does not see the light of day. Ironically, John Kerry’s name is mentioned with this film but his appearance is brief and only as a questioner. Winter Soldier played in several film festivals on its release in 1972 but looks to have been predominately panned by the public and the press. It is quite possible that very few Americans saw the film until sometime after the end of the war (after all, this was the pre-VCR, DVD days). The film was re-released in 2006 to widespread praise and included some follow-up filming with the directors and a showcase of Mr. Camil. Winter Soldiers was a likely work of passion and pride to all those involved in 1972 and solidified the growth of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. But its highest purpose may be now. This is a love letter from soldiers for soldiers, today and now, who seek answers in understanding Vietnam and in fighting back against the constant drumbeat of sending more Americans to fight and die in faraway lands. - Daniel Parker, June 22, 2014
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 16:00:44 +0000
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