There is something vaguely Christ-like about Scott Camil’s appearance in the anti-Vietnam War documentary “Winter Soldier.” Perhaps it’s his beard. Or maybe the slightly upoward-tilted gaze of the camera.
But there is hardly anything beatific in what the young man recounts during the Winter Soldier Investigation, a gathering of about 125 Vietnam vets that took place in January 1971 at a Detroit Howard Johnsons. Organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the Citizens Commission of Inquiry, the hearings were intended to make plain that the atrocities revealed by the My Lai massacre weren’t an aberration.
Thirty-four years after it was made by a group of filmmakers calling themselves the Winterfilm Collective, the documentary is receiving a more aggressive distribution. It opens today at the Starz FilmCenter.
In some ways, that weekend confab resembles South Africa’s more recent Truth and Reconciliation hearings. Only the reckoning here takes place between the soldiers and their consciences, as well as the soldiers and some of the citizens they represented.
An unmistakable air of the confessional wafts over the banquet room. Only there are no priests. And one gleans from their faces, their blank delivery (and our history), that the road to absolution for a number of these penitents will be a long, psychologically treacherous one.
“Winter Soldier” is rich with moments of excruciating eloquence. Ironically, many of them occur when a vet starts to tell another brutal story, then shuts up. A guy takes the mic, but once he corroborates another vet’s account of his company being left to fend for themselves under dogged enemy fire, he just stops. Whatever images were dredged up float back down to the silty river bottom behind his eyes.
No Vietnamese testify, of course. Though the filmmakers did intercut black-and-white footage of testimonies and interviews with the soldiers’ color slides and some news footage from Vietnam.
A loud dust-up between a white vet and an African-American vet reveals another aspect of what was roiling America at home and on the battlefield.
Without a doubt, the re-release of this spare, important document has the advantage of potent timing. More than a few people will find in “Winter Soldier” yet another prescient warning about the dangers of wars founded on fear and false reports. And trailers for “Jarhead” (based on Anthony Swofford’s memoir of the first Gulf War) make the documentary look like a warm-up act.
At this remove, casting Camil as the film’s accidental star feels like an especially bold choice on the part of the filmmakers. Camil’s testimony and interviews are rife with painful, telling, even damning contradictions.
He is hardly comfortable as an anti-war poster boy as Marine helicopter pilot Rusty
Sachs or John Kerry, who makes a quick appearance here.
If you listen to Camil’s words in their entirety, not just his moral epiphanies about atrocities, you can hear the tale of a young man who waged war long before he ever enlisted.
Skepticism is a reasonable – make that required – attitude toward some of the soldiers’ accounts. This does not make the film less powerful. Far from it. It just reminds viewers of our own responsibilities during wartime.
*** | “Winter Soldier”
NOT RATED |1 hour, 45 minutes|ANTI-WAR DOCUMENTARY|Directed by the Winterfilm Collective; featuring 30 Vietnam veterans, among them Rusty Sachs, Scott Camil, Nathan Hale, Scott Moore, Mark Lenix, John Kerry |Opens today at the Starz FilmCenter.
