Arts of War on the Web

Way back in 1983 WGBH, the Boston PBS station, produced the ambitious, acclaimed 13-hour documentry, Vietnam: A Television History, an in-depth look at Vietnam’s wars based on Stanley Karnow’s best-selling book, Vietnam: A History.

Now comes the ultimate bonus material: “The Vietnam Collection,” an on-line video archive that contains most of the materials gathered and created for the 1983 series, as well as additional Vietnam War-related material from WGBH’s archives. That includes all the interviews (with people such as Gen. William Westmoreland, North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, CBS News correspondent Walter Cronkite), news stories, still photographs and original footage.

It’s all there on the website.

My first thought when I learned there was a new documentary about the My Lai massacre was: Haven’t we heard enough about My Lai? Second thought: Could there by anything new on My Lai that would merit a 90-minute documentary? Thirdly: Were we in for another self-flagellating television event that turns the Vietnam War into one giant atrocity–and, by implication, portrays all 2.8 million Vietnam veterans as run-amok killing machines?

I had one other thought, though: This documentary would be a production of the PBS American Experience series, which for years has produced incisive, top-quality work. After watching the documentary, I am happy to report that the director, Barak Goodman, and his crew answered all three of my questions more than satisfactorily.

Although the My Lai story has been told frequently in the news media and in books and other docs (including the excellent 1993 book Four Hours at My Lai by Brit journalists Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim), this new documentary covers the entire story in detail from beginning to end. It features revealing new interviews with members of Charlie Company; with Larry Colburn, one of helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson’s door gunners; with Aubrey Daniel, the Army prosecutor of Lt. William Calley; with Army photographer Ronald Haeberle, who was on the scene; and with others involved in the case. Not to mention with several Vietnamese survivors of the massacre. And with Bilton and others who have wide knowledge about it.

Goodman mixes in excellent archival Vietnam War footage, not all of it of Charlie Company, naturally, but most of it very evocative of the events before and after what happened on March 16, 1978. And he makes good use of the reports of the case on the network news, from the time it burst on the news scene in 1969 to the courts-martial of Calley and Capt. Ernest Medina.

The testimony of the Vietnamese villagers and voices and words of the newly interviewed Charlie Company men (Thomas Turner, Thomas Partsch, Joseph Grimes, John Smail, Gregory Olsen, and Lawrence LaCroix) were revealing and effective. The men made you feel what it was like on the ground, especially in the weeks before My Lai happened. The Vietnamese made you feel what it was like during the horror of the massacre.

As for the My Lai-as-aberration-or-business-as-usual question, this thorough, engaging and well produced documentary stuck to the facts of this incident–and the Army’s attempted cover up of it. There was no attempt to deal with other massacres in the war (by either side). That is as it should be.

The American Experience My Lai documentary airs tonight, Monday, April 26, 2010, on PBS stations nationwide. Be aware that there are gruesome photos of the massacre. But also be aware that this is an excellent documentary that gives a full, complete view of the My Lai massacre.

PBS also has an very good, extensive web site with even more info on My Lai and the making of the doc.

Bill Lawrence, who served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War (from 1960-64), has put together “Chaplains Under Fire,” a feature-length documentary on military chaplains, much of it shot during the three months he spent embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The doc will be screened tonight, Tuesday, April 6, at 6:30 at the  Walter Reade Theater in New York City’s Lincoln Center.

“This is a self-financed, independent film, with no political or religious agenda,” Lawrence told us. “It looks at the work chaplains actually do downrange through the lens of the troops they are there to serve. Plus, it’s a balanced look at the arguments, pro and con, from everyone from evangelical fundamentalists who think chaplains are being muzzled, to those who think the institution of the chaplaincy is unconstitutional.”

There will be a Q&A with the filmmakers followed by a reception after the screening. And there will be a screening at the Nuseum in Washington, D.C., on April 30th.

Just heard from Lana Noone, who runs the www.Vietnambabylift.org web site. She will be coordinating the Vietnam Operation Babylift 35th Anniversary Event on Saturday, April 24, beginning at 11:00 a.m. at the New Jersey Vietnam Era Educational Center in Holmdel.

Operation Babylift was the code name for the April 3-26, 1975, evacuation of thousands of orphans and other children from South Vietnam to the United States and other countries as Saigon was falling to the Vietnamese communists in the chaotic last days of the Vietnam War.

The Event includes speakers, a musical performance, an art and artifacts exhibit and a screening of Tammy Nguyen Lee’s award-winning documentary, Operation Babylift-The Lost Children of Vietnam. Several cast and crew members will be n attendance, and will take part in a Q and A and reception after the screening.

The new documentary, The Philosopher Kings, looks at the lives of a eight custodians who work at several universities, including Cornell, Princeton, Duke, and Cal Tech. “The idea was to seek wisdom from those we consider to be on the fringes of society and to point out that intelligence is not exclusive to classrooms, professors, or those we normally attribute to be the wise people in our culture,” said director and co-producer Patrick Shen. “We set out to tell their stories, to bring humanity and dignity to people we don’t normally see.”

The two custodians in the film from Cornell, Jim Evener and Gary Napieracz, are close friends and also are Vietnam veterans. Both come off very well in the film. “They asked me what was the most important or dramatic part of my life, and I said, ‘My parents dying . . . and Vietnam,’” Napieracz told the Cornell University Alumni magazine. “We started talking about the war and I said, ‘Let me tell you, I’m not the perfect person to be interviewed about Vietnam. I have a good friend who’s a hero in my eyes.’”

That would be Evener, who has a prominent role in the film, talking about his life, including his Army service in Vietnam, where he was severely wounded on a resupply mission. “It was like somebody poked you with a punch, between that and an electric shock,” Evener said. “I didn’t go flying over any logs or through the air like you see on TV.” Evener wound up crawling through the jungle for three days before he was rescued.

The film had its debut in June at the Silverdocs Film Festival in Silver Spring, Maryland, and has been on the documentary circuit in festivals, at churches, museums and universities since then here, in Canada and in England. It’s also available on DVD. You can see a trailer at the Cornell U. Alumni magazine page or find out more and order a copy at the film’s website.

Back in the late seventies or early eighties when I was working as a journalist in Washington, D.C., I covered a press conference in which the famed radical activist lawyer William Kunstler was a featured performer. I use the word “performer” advisedly because that was my impression of the guy in person: He was putting on a show, and a show that was more or less about William Kunstler. He postured and preened and showed a generally high regard for himself. I have no recollection of what cause the press conference was promoting, just an image of a sixties icon in the flesh.

That performance left me with a low regard for the man who was most famous for being the lead counsel in the bombastic Chicago Seven trial, in which a group of radical antiwar activists (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, et al.) were accused of inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

My feelings about Kunstler, strangely enough, were shared to a degree by his two youngest daughters, Emily and Sarah Kunstler (above), the offspring of his second marriage—the one that came after he left his first wife and children and his run-of-the-mill law practice to wade hip deep into left-wing legal activism.

The girls were born in 1976 and 1978, when their father was 57 and 59 years old. As young girls, they idolized their father; but as they grew up, their opinion of their flamboyant, media-hungry father changed, mainly because of his penchant for “defending bad people,” alleged rapists, terrorists, and organized crime figures.

“At some point, Emily Kunstler says, “he stopped standing for anything.”

The two women do an excellent job telling their father’s life story (he died in 1994) in William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, a documentary that Sarah Kunstler wrote and that she and her sister produced and directed. We get the details of William K’s life, including his service in the Pacific as an Army officer in World War II during which he was awarded the Bronze Star. The film,naturally enough, focuses on his work in the sixties and seventies when he became a nationally known figure.

It’s a personal film and it works on that level—the story of two bright, accomplished young women coming to terms with their famous father’s conflicted legacy.

Detroit-based Visionalist Entertainment Productions and Executive Producer Keith Famie will be producing a documentary next year called “Michigan: Our Vietnam Generation.” The doc will pay homage to the service and sacrifice of Michigan’s Vietnam veterans.  The producers are in the process of funding the project, and they are also looking for stories from men and women who served.

Among other things, Famie put together “From Hanoi to China Beach,” an Emmy-nominated hour-long documentary that was filmed in Vietnam. That 1999 film, which Famie dedicated to “the men, women, and children who lost their lives during the Vietnam War,” examines a bicycle trip he and a group of Vietnam veterans took.

If you’d like to learn more about the new documentary or would like to offer your war story, email Famie at famie@famie.com; call 248-869-0096; or go http://www.v-prod.com

One of the highlights of Vietnam Veterans of America’s last National Leadership Conference, in July 2008 in Greenville, South Carolina, was the screening of the stirring documentary The Way We Get By presented by the filmmakers, Gita Pullapilly and Aron Gaudet.

The film, which will have its national broadcast premier on Wednesday, November 11 (Veterans Day) at 9:00 p.m. on PBS’s always-excellent documentary series POV, looks at three people in Bangor, Maine, (Bill Knight, Joan Gaudet, and Jerry Mundy, below) who greet American troops flying to and from Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Since its showing in Greenville the film has received rave reviews and won many film festival awards. You can see a streaming video trailer, an interview with the filmmakers, as well as a list of related websites, organizations and books, lesson plans, and discussion guides at http://www.pbs.org/pov/waywegetby/ and www.pbs.org/pov

The Way We Get By will be available for sale on DVD at www.thewaywegetbymovie.com beginning Nov. 3. The price is $19.99.

The enlightening documentary, A Village Called Versailles, which has appeared on PBS and is being show theatrically in several cities this fall, is now available on DVD. This award-winning doc tells several stories, all of which have to do with the eastern New Orleans community of Versailles, which is home to thousands of Vietnamese families—refugees who came here following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, and their children and grandchildren.

Versailles is named for the modest Versailles Gardens apartment complex where the first refugees settled in the late seventies. This thriving virtually all-Vietnamese community, about 20 miles east of the French Quarter, is anchored by Our Lady of Vietnam Catholic church, and had been a community that few people knew about. Until Hurricane Katrina, that is, when the area was flooded out and its residents were forced to flee (some to the same refugee camp in Arkansas where the were sent when they arrived here).

The community hit the local spotlight, though, months later when the city of New Orleans decided to dump mountains of debris in a landfill right next door. The documentary, ably produced and directed by S. Leo Chiang, focuses on how the community rallied against the landfill, and, in the process, came into the limelight.

The The Most Dangerous Man in America, a new documentary co-directed by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith, had its debut September 11 at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film, which opens in several theaters around the nation this week, tells the story of Daniel Ellsberg who made his mark in American history in 1971 when he leaked the Pentagon Papers.

The documentary, which Ellsberg narrates, also covers his life as a gung-ho Marine in the mid-sixties, and his conversion to Vietnam War skeptic–and then to antiwar activist–after he went over there and saw first hand what was happening in the field.

“The movie is an act of hero worship, but it inadvertently suggests that, without a necessary touch of grandiosity, Ellsberg might never have acted as bravely as he did,” The New Yorker film reviewer David Denby noted in his otherwise positive review.

David Edelstein, writing in New York magazine, had nothing but praise for the movie. The film, he said, “offers one revelatory interview after another mixed with reenactments (animated) that have fun with the caper-movie aspect and build real suspense. So many people risked their livelihoods to put the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers out there—although its most tangible result was the creation of Nixon’s plumbers unit.”