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By Marc Leepson
The powerful documentary Vietnam: Homecoming, which appeared
on The History Channel last December 15, has as its putative
theme the week-long Operation Homecoming for Vietnam veterans
held in Branson, Missouri, in June of 2005. But at its heart
this compelling piece of work produced by Lou Reda Productions
and directed and edited by Sammy Jackson is the deeply personal
life stories of a handful of Vietnam veterans who struggle
on a daily basis with PTSD.
Jackson frames his 90-minute narrative
around the Branson event, and he does provide shots of the
parade and other parts of the resort town’s Operation
Homecoming, including an appearance of one of the Moving
Walls. Two of the men, Purvis Crowe and John Hedrick, have
an emotional and potentially cathartic reunion at Branson.
One man, Joe Moss, who lost his legs and who still suffers
acute psychic wounds from his Vietnam War combat experiences,
chose not to make the trip.
The film focuses on the words and deeds of Crowe, Hedrick,
Moss, and two other men with PTSD—Stanley Parker and
Mike Cook. The camera zooms in on the men and on their wives
as they speak emotionally and movingly about the continuing
impact of the war on their lives and psyches. “I’ve
been gone from Vietnam since December of 1968,” Crowe
says. “I’ve got memories that haunt me. It’s
something I live with every day of my life, and it doesn’t
take very much to trigger it.”
The men recount events
that happened more than three decades ago as if they had
happened three minutes ago. Underscoring that hard truth
are some of the most powerful pieces of Vietnam War footage
that have made it onto celluloid. When the veterans speak
of flashbacks to a time when they are in the thick of action
in Vietnam, Jackson cuts to Sixties footage of American soldiers
under fire. We see plenty of close-ups of severely wounded
men, of dead men, and of fellow soldiers reacting in shock
and despair to the horror. The digital flashbacks make the
men’s flashbacks all too real.
The
men reflect on the underwhelming reception they faced when
they came home—a story that every Vietnam veteran
knows only too well. Several recount the indignities they
faced from some in the antiwar movement. Those sentiments
are illustrated with film of protestors flying the Viet Cong
flag and carrying signs calling us baby killers. Those sensationalized
images are not representative of the antiwar movement (which
also was made up of plenty of Vietnam veterans and others
who had no use for VC flags) but make the point that the
country was in turmoil when we came home.
More to the point
is the fact that the VA and the federal government as a whole,
along with the old-line VSOs, also turned their backs on
Vietnam veterans. The veterans in this film briefly mention
those other two sides of the back-home “Iron
Triangle.” Cook, who survived the hell of combat in
Vietnam, speaks of how he was asked to join the American
Legion, only to be told he did not take part in a war. He
told the American Legion what to do with that sentiment.
The film soon will be available on DVD. For info, go to www.redafilms.com
MEMORIAL
PRIZE
The award-winning Vietnam Veterans Memorial in February received
another honor, the American Institute of Architect’s
2007 Twenty-five Year Award, which recognizes structures
of enduring significance completed 25 to 35 years ago. Past
winners of the award, which was first presented in 1969,
include I.M. Pei’s National Gallery of Art East Building
in Washington; the U.S. Air Force Academy’s Cadet Chapel
in Colorado Springs; St. Louis’s Gateway Arch designed
by Eero Saarinen; New York City’s Guggenheim Museum
designed by Frank Lloyd Wright; and Rockefeller Center, which
has been a National Historic Landmark since 1988.
The AIA,
the nation’s top architects’ professional
association, was a strong advocate of Maya Lin’s initially
controversial design for the Memorial and in 1984 awarded
the project an AIA Honor Award for Architecture. “The
Memorial is a message to all visitors about the horrendous
loss of war, the tragic cost of conflict,” Louis R.
Pounders, the chair of the Twenty-five Year Award Committee,
said in his nomination letter. “It is a message that
is timeless.”
Maya Lin has gone on to become one of
the nation’s
top memorial architects in the last 25 years. She also has
branched out into sculpture and landscape architecture. Her
accomplishments include designing the Civil Rights Memorial
in Birmingham, Alabama. In 2003, Lin served on the selection
jury of the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition.
In 2005, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts
and Letters and the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
ARTS
IN BRIEF
The folks at the G.I. Radio Network started a new call-in
radio talk show called “Military Talks.US” on
March 3. The show is designed both for veterans and active-duty
military personnel and covers the latest military news, VA
updates, reunions, and special events. The show airs on 1230
WBZT Talk Radio in Palm Beach on Saturdays from 7:00 to 9:00
p.m. and is simulcast on the Internet at www.MilitaryTalks.us and www.GIRadio.us If
you’d like to contact the producers,
e-mail MilitaryTalk@aol.com and tell them you read about
the show in these pages.
Japanese photographer Goro Nakamura’s
exhibit of photographs depicting the effects of Agent Orange
victims in Vietnam opened February 7 at the City University
of New York’s
John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. It will
run through June 16. The collection of black-and-white photos
shows the consequences of Agent Orange and dioxin on the
people and environment in Vietnam. In 2000, Nakamura exhibited
photos on the same topic in Hanoi and Saigon. He announced
that he will donate all money from the sale of the photos
to Vietnamese relief agencies for Agent Orange victims. For
info, call 212-691-7978.
Robert Greenwald of the Brave New
Foundation has created an on-line memorial to the American
service personnel who have died in the Iraq War. “Inspired
by the AIDS Quilt, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and The
New York Times biographies of the 9/11 victims, we decided
to create a living online memorial called the Iraq Veterans
Memorial,” Greenwald
said. The memorial, he said, “will bear witness with
60-second video testimonies of family, friends, co-workers,
and military colleagues of those killed—memories and
anecdotes that will always remind us of the impact their
lives had on those who loved them.”
The virtual memorial
was unveiled March 19, the fourth anniversary of the beginning
of the war. You can visit it and learn how to add to the
memorial by going to http://iraqmemorial.org
If
you read Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” on
January 16 and 19, you saw that the noted cartoonist for
the first time worked VVA into his long-time comic strip.
Trudeau, who received VVA’s President’s Award
for Excellence in the Arts at the Leadership Conference in
Tucson last year, evidently drew inspiration from meeting
so many conference attendees sporting VVA tee shirts. That’s
because Dex, one of the participants in B.D.’s veterans’ support
group, is wearing a tee-shirt adorned with “VVA” across
the front in both strips.
ATTENTION: ARTISTS
The Veterans Day National Committee, which is made up of
representatives from the big VSOs and is chaired by the VA
Secretary, is looking for submissions for the official 2007
national Veterans Day poster. The poster will be distributed
to 110,000 schools across the country, as well as to military
bases around the world and to government offices in the Washington,
D.C., area. It also will appear on the cover of the official
program for the Veterans Day ceremonies at Arlington National
Cemetery.
The committee will meet in May to review submissions.
You can submit an electronic version or send a copy of your
work on a CD. The final poster must be 18 by 24 inches at
300 dots per inch, but submissions should be scaled down
to 9 by 12 inches. The e-mail for submissions is vetsday@va.gov
The mailing address is: Department of Veterans Affairs (002C),
810 Vermont Ave. N.W., Washington, DC 20420. For more info,
go to www.va.gov/vetsday and click on “Poster Gallery.”
ATTENTION:
BUGLERS
The VA’s National Cemetery Administration is looking
for volunteer buglers to participate in an event called Echo
Taps Nationwide on May 19, Armed Forces Day. The event will
be part of Echo Taps Worldwide, which is designed to honor
and remember American veterans through a worldwide performance
of “Taps.” The organizers hope that the event
will interest brass players enough so that they will volunteer
to perform “Taps” at military funerals of veterans
throughout the year.
During the Echo Taps Nationwide event,
players will form a line through a cemetery and perform a
cascading version of “Taps.” The first large
such event took place two years ago in New York when 674
brass players from 30 states lined 42 miles of road between
Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira and Bath National Cemetery in
Bath. They played “Taps” in
cascade, and it took nearly three hours from the time the
first note sounded at Woodlawn until the last note came at
Bath. Echo Taps events were held at 52 national cemeteries
and state veterans cemeteries last Veterans Day. To learn
more and to register, go to www.echotaps.org
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2008, Vietnam Veterans of America. All Rights Reserved. 8605 Cameron
Street, Silver Spring, MD 20910