DOCUMENTARY IN SEARCH OF A WAR

...But Mr...

...The film adopts some cliches and invents some...

...It is like this with America and Vietnam...

...Through much of its length Hearts and Minds affects one like the sight of a child who is reprimanded and, for the first time, looks up with that puzzled openness which is the suspicion that the world may have been just...

...What we are seeing now is another phase of indifference, this time colored by fear...

...A gifted musician, he shared my idiocies in chemistry...

...asked if the country can learn from Vietnam, he shakes his head: "We're trying hard not to...

...Anecdotes of combat far more revelatory than a camera's bag of tricks are brought to a close by a camera trick: revealing, say, a crippled arm or leg on the man who has been speaking all along...

...Davis's governing worry, his editorial strategy falls clearly into place...

...this is the only way you will earn people's trust...

...As a vehicle for uncharted human facts about the war Hearts and Minds succeeds about as well as can be imagined...

...Davis thought he was doing in the employment of a football analogy for war, with impetuous coaches sitting in for toosanguine generals, is a minor matter beside the question of his focus on every kind of small prosaic fanaticism of American life: was it these things—parades, holidays, competitions, all the little wellings-up of ritual that seem to be necessary to a community—that Mr...

...Nothing could penetrate the blight of sympathy that came of this terrible and stifling lack of knowledge...

...In the future, before building his effects, I hope the talented Mr...

...That we were able to loathe our South Vietnamese allies as cowards and—impossible for an American to respect—unsuccessfully corrupt politicians, probably helped some of the steam to escape as the war wound down...

...I can't believe it...

...What Mr...

...Davis will sit still awhile to think what he is building toward...

...The most likely movement away from cynicism— possibly for all people, certainly for Americans—is into sentimentality...

...So, when he portrays the monstrosity of war, his stress turns rhetorical in the most perfunctory way...

...A growing complexity in the American response to the war is plain when 398 DAVID BROMWICH one sets a sequence in Hearts and Minds about the patriotic returned prisoner, Lieutenant Coker, against the film clip of a draft resister, Eddie Sowders, giving himself over to the authorities...

...In its portrayal of one special and acutely painful shock of recognition, experienced, across class boundaries, by a whole nation that was jolted from sleep when the drama it had wandered into struck a not quite perceptible climax, Mr...

...Yet there are images of a different kind that operate more severely on their witnesses...

...This was our war over the back-street fence...

...it turns the dreams into nightmares, by making them real...

...Dickens somewhere tells the story of a man who subjected his wife to merciless poverty along with a host of abuses more specially contrived, then went mad himself, and, on his deathbed, cursed her as the demon she must be, for otherwise how could she have borne all he had done to her...

...To have pounced there would have been at least straightforwardly opportunist...

...Davis's effort seems to me defini395 tive...

...I have gone on about the shoddiness of Hearts and Minds because its flaws seem to a large extent learned from nondocumentary films...

...And, when one compares these two very recognizable figures, the shock is that Eddie Sowders radiates an energy the older type of hero, traveling by rote, can no longer command...

...Davis is not the one to remind his audience of what perhaps needs saying, that the evil smell given off by our camp followers was never in question...

...Leaving aside the political reality of a civil war that turned partly on resistance to Communism, which was met on our side by the full-blown certitude of coldwar ideology, the issue for America was always whether this disconnection could be compassed...

...make the gestures of thinking, that will be enough...

...Now is the time to feel...

...The effect was curiously abstract...

...This ought to be resisted by all those who were strong enough to resist the war: they will surely need to remain tough-minded while they preserve the memory of one part of the fight...

...Davis stays clear of a genuine political alertness to the war, he grows interested in pathos for its own sake...

...Davis's bewilderment at the absence of any pattern differs from everyone else's only in being more irritably posed...

...It used to be said that such a response was the characteristic weakness in our conception of the Communist world as a whole, but, as the know-your-enemy classes in our public schools demonstrated to anyone obliged to take them, the treatment accorded to this wider topic had an extremely literal as well as a mythical force...

...Strangely, for a documentary about war, the film was shot in color...

...The enemies, the responsible, the guilty ones: they ought to make an easy target...

...It would record the baffling removal of those who sacrificed from knowledge of their sacrifice, and the choked flow of information in an atmosphere glutted with news...

...The war, we are offered at one point, was a case of straight imperialist ambition: Eisenhower's celebrated remark about our need for tungsten is quoted without comment, and certainly without the caution proper to irony...

...Some kid heaved it over the fence, in there among the people, and left before he could know the damage or be caught...

...He was killed in the back of a lorry, among the odd and out, when a South Vietnamese unit mistakenly attacked some Americans: he had joined a band and gone over, at eighteen, to entertain...

...The intellectual's role, however, if he is faithful to all that he has witnessed, would seem to be that of therapist, in releasing others from the thrall of an irrational logic that can never lead to wisdom...

...And in proportion as Mr...

...So I came back and decided to prepare for peace...

...But oh, the surprise of watching those bombs land now, on the record, to rake fatally over a land that has the green look of farms and grasses...

...Another try at describing the war would tell of the paradox of a mass suffrage democracy in which the government must decide quickly and yet decide with more than the tacit consent of those it rules...

...Yesterday, a friend told me of the temporary deafness he was suffering after a ball game, where a cherry bomb had exploded near him in the bleachers...

...and, in the one that has been tried, the mistake of artful hedging looks so obvious as to bar repetition...

...It was their tactic to protest against the "conduct" of the war, in terms that swerved carefully away from moral objection...

...Surprise, a tiny thrill of it, has become the first order of business...

...Its technical adeptness had perhaps something in common with American management of the war itself...

...others, baffled or angry, point to their wounds and ask for a reason...

...A large, affluent nation, fabulously at the ready, launched into battle half-way around the world to defend a small country against the recalcitrant mood of its own people...

...Very well: the battle scars of this unfortunate veteran of "political science" no doubt have a bearing on the overtly selfish element in our foreign policy...

...Yet, though the film swells with nervous defensive measures of this turn, their effect is not so much deepening as nervous-making...

...The shared antihistorical and indeed antipolitical bias of these two efforts so apparently discrete from each other, seemed to me a kind of trahison...

...Shortly after I saw it, I spent an evening with CBS television's lengthy survey of the history of the war...

...Would the war have been less murderous if the news we all saw had been filled with episodes like this, and not with the drained faces of anonymous soldiers...

...The occasional premeditated doses of earnestness are simply one more evasion, a new kind of abstraction...

...In Paris I saw that peace was coming whether we liked it or not...

...Hearts and Minds registers the astonishment of those who were caught on the inside...

...Davis in the part of decent intellectual, rather than any number of others whose conversion was less sudden and public...

...It is like the novelistic gambit of coincidence, and with about the same merit as a guide to truth...

...DOCUMENTARY IN SEARCH OF A WAR 399...

...In shuffling through his own marked deck, Mr...

...It has been called a new isolationism, but the Mayaguez incident gives sound enough evidence that the pride of standing alone, when provoked by a bad memory, will yield without protest to vengefulness...

...Several times, in the CBS offering, one heard that "we were misled," in exactly those words, a sentence denoting action without an agent...

...By the South Vietnamese...

...On the other hand Hearts and Minds succumbs to the temptation of sailing to a neat victory over all too personal scapegoats...

...the raw material, interviews, combat footage, debates in the Senate, is there for a film to be made of...

...I'm dying in this shitty place," makes part of the story of any war...

...Eddie Sowders speaks with the unassuming eloquence and morality of a good man who has been found by a conscience greater than himself...

...His camera dwells for so long in close-up on two grief-stricken Vietnamese women that it loses the distance appropriate either to objectivity or sympathy and begins to seem an affront...

...I am writing on the Fourth of July...

...Hearts and Minds came out at the time of the last North Vietnamese offensive and the fall of Saigon...

...later, they will become angry or reflective...

...The war-is-football inanity is actually purloined from Mash, 396 DAVID BROMWICH but Hearts and Minds, innocent of the earlier film's high spirits, appears to mean it in all solemnity...

...This film, notable as a document for the countless unexpected statements it records and salutes in passing, touches one because it fixes Americans in a rare moment before disbelief has hardened into some more specific attitude...

...Americans never believed in Vietnam...

...The monotone of daily battle reports has been broken, let us hope forever...

...Unfortunately, they will not be aided by the current of an antiwar rhetoric that became more popularfrontist and less specific with each passing year...

...The director's awareness of his falling short gives the film a slightly frantic air...

...It devotes a glorious passage to the Swiftian irrelevance and complacency of Walt Rostow unraveling his mastery of geopolitics...

...One could trace a fairly constant decline in the intellectual content of antiwar celebrities, from Hans Morgenthau and Senator Morse to Daniel Berrigan and Senator McGovern: Ellsberg appears for Mr...

...Hearts and Minds forestalls criticism of all such sequences by including the shout of an especially shrewd peasant who runs alongside the crew: "First they bring bombs, then cameras...

...We are still playing games—in Vietnam, we heaved real bombs...

...Taking care lest the record be purged of nuance will be one necessary preoccupation of the near future...

...The disconnection we all suffered from can be healed only by being truly known...

...But let me suggest that it is the Hemingwayesque cynicism in talk about the war—our confidence that we were dupes of some vague antagonist—which misleads, most of all, by disarming the sting of experience with the self-regarding conceit of having been wounded...

...Insofar as an unmeaning shudder goes through most people when DOCUMENTARY IN SEARCH OF A WAR 397 they think of the war at all, nothing can be done apart from standing aside and letting the revulsion be spent...

...Every year the fire crackers outside get bigger and noisier...

...It was as if the makers of our official or semiofficial documents were all bewitched by the same false muse, who said: "Feeling and thinking about politics are very different things, you must never do both at once...

...American response to the war has grown more rather than less Manichean over the years...

...Early on, Marshal Ky named Hitler as his favorite historical personage and was gently rebuked or interpreted...

...Such a response is at last rendered null by Hearts and Minds...

...It was a good thing for us that we were caught...

...An Air Force pilot sits on the stoop of his house in Oklahoma...

...A montage of faces distorted by prowar sentiment, like the shots of aesthetically unappealing, because vulgar and aged, supporters of Nixon in Millhouse, makes the unwitting point that the only defect of character or ambition this film can traffic in belongs imprecisely to the American spirit itself...

...it is eclectic...

...To have said so would have showed admirable courage in the network...

...With every gesture, however, with every swooping closeup and self-scrutinizing fillip, its director convinces his audience that he is out to create not a document of shreds and patches but a work of art on the grand scale...

...The Americans in the film have been stopped after long indulgence...

...argument about its motive was frowned upon...

...When once this is understood as Mr...

...Nothing could be more harmful to an art that puts fact before fiction than this appropriation of post-Graduate tics to conceal an unsteady point of view...

...Davis has a particularly dismaying portrait of a Saigon industrialist on the make, who says quite blandly and without even a smile: "I'm a johnny-come-lately to war profiteering...

...This wide-ranging and faintly truculent search for a method to the madness of Vietnam brings the film to no satisfactory conclusion...

...Our leaders, simple or corrupt or helpless, were defeated by a sense of detachment that had no end...

...The soldier who talks about almost dying in battle, when his last thought was the blank "This is it...

...this stinks"— and finally a stage of fear...

...Does any party benefit from this cloven fiction that threatens to become the stock in trade of mass journalism...

...In this other endeavor, though his failure is dismal and not at all noble, the result has the interest of any received and pretentious and authoritative instance of bad thinking...

...But do we learn, from the fact that he makes an ass of himself on film in very short order, an important lesson about the national character, or the science of politics, or the origin of our Vietnam policy, or indeed any subject but the effect of the Texas climate on a mind weirdly insulated already...

...The situation claimed its victims long before its own features had grown familiar...

...We stubbornly and quite understandably go on believing that recognition, where matters of life and death are concerned, has at least the power to chasten...

...I should think the way might be open for a documentary that told the full story of this war as it was experienced by a nation that deceived itself into great wrong...

...For the imaginative purposes of the nation, Vietnam is our recent history...

...and, in a queer but consistent way, the disease it exemplifies is of a piece with the one it depicts...

...But, as with many documentaries, the tale here really does know more than the teller...

...Lieutenant Coker speaks of American courage, of survival, of the eternal boyscout verities, and he is attended to by lucky audiences of mothers and children who are glad to know how good they were or will be...

...The trouble is that so simply conceived an adversary is likely to be too particular and at the same time too universal...

...So dangerously moral a quest had better have been left undone if it could not be embarked on wholeheartedly...

...For it was only America that was prepared for the war, not Americans: their reaction went through a stage of indifference, then resentment—nicely captured in the moment in Hearts and Minds when a soldier firing from his barricade, asked if he believes in his job, turns to reply "Yes—well, they say we're fighting for something...

...Misled by whom...

...But, in Vietnam, the note of last-ditch sourness was plain truth...

...Finally it might, a little hopefully, draw a moral from the Renaissance allegory of the knight who rode into combat as a subtle monster of will, and, out of the trouble sown by his arrogance, was made anew and rode back as a man...

...By our government...

...It would show the distrust of politics, unvoiced and without a chance of reaching its object, which impaired the expression of will, including the will to refuse, among a people for whom international politics had taken on an exotic look...

...Interviews with several veterans and their families are therefore at the emotional center of the film...

...We want to cry for the women, and with them, and throw away the camera...

...But color is somehow necessary to the part of the truth it has come to tell...

...When American soldiers went to Vietnam, they also stayed at home, on television, in battle reports that droned for a precise interval and then ceased for 24 hours, and these few feet of action-news, as it is now called, clipped and framed and grimly packaged, helped to form and indeed were for most Americans the experience of the Vietnamese war...

...It is the same man who will ponder his own inability to cry and find an answer in a war started without passion and fought without conviction...

...It is hard to know...

...The administrative men of good will who began slowly to oppose the war—like Clark Clifford, interviewed in the film—had been frightened by dreams that could not show the solidity of flesh and blood...

...Well, we were misled...

...A mother and father, Concord Emersons, who lost their boy in the war clearly feel that faith with their country must be kept up even at this cost: their settled belief, in the face of a death that makes no sense to them, that America means the best and the future and whatever will be is right, brings a sudden and local pathos to the spectacle of a nation cut from its most ancient political mooring, the uncritical trust in progress...

...The sense of being arrayed ineffectually against the powers of darkness came in with Vietnam...

...When the grief is no longer there to report—is that when sober judgment begins or when caring ends...

...Davis believes got us into Vietnam...

...One virtue of Peter Davis's recent film Hearts and Minds is its understanding that a picture of this war, to be unbearable, must only be vivid...

...The idea of a war without consequence for one side, and so without even the possibility of conscience, is surely something new in history...

...We interrupted an event that we would rather not have attended and then tried to escape...

...and they do nothing to clarify the essential confusion, which persists among ordinary men and women, about what the war could have meant...

...I remember, for example, a boy from high school, the only one I knew who went to Vietnam, an awkward, nervous, and ironic student with a precocious sense of life's weight that made him seem always in retreat...

...Whatever our disgust with the American politics involved in Vietnam, our visions have been too much in gray: this was the trouble...

...Some are burdened by the immensity of what has been done...

...They are, right now, much too amazed to say anything coherently...