Winter Soldier (review)

"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman." These words from Thomas Paine's first installment of articles, collectively known as The Crisis, are referenced and provide the nomenclature (by implication, the "winter soldier" is the one who stays the course) of the Vietnam Veteran's Against the War (VVAW) 1971 testimonies known as the Winter Soldier Investigation. During the winter of 1971, for three days in Detroit, Michigan, more than one hundred veterans, mostly honorably discharged soldiers, testified about atrocities they committed or witnessed in Vietnam. The event was in reaction to the military's investigation into the My Lai massacre of 1968 and its subsequent conclusion that it was a "unique and isolated incident." The Winter Soldier testimonies implied that such actions were routine policy. The VVAW was one of the most influential and controversial antiwar groups during the Vietnam era. Formed in 1967 by six Vietnam veterans, by the end of the decade it had thousands of members. The Winter Soldier Investigation was but one of many VVAW events designed to draw attention to antiwar sentiments by actual soldiers in the conflict. The testimonies of the Winter Soldier Investigation might have become a mere footnote in the history of the era had it not been documented on film.

Milliarium Zero/Milestone's recent DVD release of Winter Soldier (1972), a feature film made by a group of sixteen New York filmmakers and technicians collectively known only as Winterfilm, documents the three grueling days of soldier's testimonies concerning rape, torture, and killing that occurred seemingly on a regular basis in Vietnam. The filmmakers' (one of whom was Barbara Kopple, who would go on to direct Harlan County U.S.A. in 1976) intentional anonymity places the emphasis of the film on the veterans themselves and their revelations. Perhaps one of the most surprising, as well as disconcerting, things about the film is the extremely candid nature of the testimonies themselves. Coming as it does thirty-four years after the event itself Winter Soldier is not so much a documentary as it is living history. The unfolding of testimonies from veteran to veteran has an immediacy and forthright importance about it that is doubled by the recent revelation of similar events at Abu Ghraib in 2004. As the Vietnam War continued, these ex-soldiers gathered together at a Howard Johnson's motel to discuss their experiences in combat and military training in a press conference format. The harrowing accounts of rape, torture, mutilation, and killing almost defy believability. But the candid nature of the testimonials and the look on the faces of the veterans as they recount their stories in a matter-of-fact manner dispel any disbelief. The importance of the film lies in its very nature as a living document to the atrocity of war itself—rather than as an account of war atrocities.

The film is organized into three segments. The first consists of the preliminary interviews with the veterans. This opening section introduces several men who will bear witness during the testimonies themselves, including Rusty Sachs and Scott Camil, who are among the veterans featured prominently in the film. The revelations of the wartime atrocities begin immediately with Sachs telling the interviewer about seeing prisoners, bound with copper wire, tossed from aircraft and how he was being told not to count prisoners when they boarded an aircraft but rather when they disembarked; counts taken at boarding may not match counts at disembarkation. Camil likewise discusses the burning of a village and the killing of its inhabitants simply to show that they "were not fucking around." This segment of the film also includes brief footage of John Kerry interviewing one of the veterans. This preliminary section prepares the viewer for what is to come in the testimonies themselves.

The film footage of the Winter Soldier...