REGRETS ABOUT WATCHING A DOCUMENTARY

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As a longtime but wary viewer of Vietnam War flicks, I’ve learned that to be moved by a piece of work is not necessarily the same as to be illuminated by it. This is true of the documentary "Regret to Inform," about Vietnam War widows, by Barbara Sonneborn.

While I was moved to tears by parts of the film, I found little that jibed with my own Vietnamese memory: that of a country deeply divided by a civil war, where North and South were at each other’s throats long before the Americans arrived. My eldest uncle joined Ho Chi Minh’s army in the North while his two brothers joined the South, later becoming pilots who dropped B-52 bombs on him and his troops. It is a memory of Vietnamese killing Vietnamese in a bloody and senseless theater where Americans were mere side actors.

That America plays the central role in Sonneborn’s documentary is no surprise. After all, Vietnam was a complicated, three-sided war, a difficult narrative that often gets reduced to two sides – America vs. all Vietnamese.

From that perspective, we see Americans as perpetrators of violence and Vietnamese as innocents in conical hats, waiting to be murdered. We are told this not so much in words but in the footage of American planes dropping bombs and napalm onto the tropical landscape. We are shown Vietnamese being herded and tied up like oxen by GIs or beaten by the butts of M-16s.

Not once do we see a Vietnamese holding a gun. Not once do we see a Vietnamese in army uniform. Only Americans have that privilege, as GIs, as wielders of history.

Vietnamese, so the images suggest, were passive victims of their fate – which does not explain America’s defeat.

What I want to tell Sonneborn and all American filmmakers is this: Vietnam is not 14 years old. Vietnam’s story does not begin when the first American helicopter landed in the rice fields, and it does not end when the last helicopter left the rooftop of the American Embassy in Saigon. In the 20^th century alone, Vietnamese fought, besides their countrymen, the French, the Japanese and the Chinese, and then went on to occupy Cambodia for 10 years. They never lost a war – not counting South Vietnam’s defeat.

"What is the legacy of war?" Sonneborn asks in her film, "and what happens after the troops go home?"

What happened is that Hanoi – America’s victim-turned-victor – immediately enforced a vindictive policy in the defeated South, putting nearly a million men in "re-education" camps and forcing hundreds of thousands of families to survive in malaria-infested New Economic Zones while confiscating their properties. More than 2 million Vietnamese risked death at sea as boat people to escape.

Where, I wonder, are the voices of the widows whose husbands starved to death in re-education camps? Where are the voices of those who ended up in refugee camps waiting to be accepted by the West?

Why, I wonder, is it easier for filmmakers to fly thousands of miles across the ocean to Hanoi to interview communist officials and film scenes of exotic limestone mountains or sparkling rivers than it is to drive a few miles to San Jose or Los Angeles or Dallas to interview the million or so Vietnamese-Americans? Is it because their epic story might somehow dislodge Americans’ own narcissistic sense of guilt?

If that is the case, the answer to Sonneborn’s question regarding the legacy of war is this: War and its aftermath are always bad, but it is worse when its history is simplified and its many voices muffled. The result of such misinformation is always ignorance.

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The Vietnam War once again is in the background of a TV documentary directed by the wife of a fallen American warrior who was killed in action by a Communist mortar shell on February 6, 1968.

The film director Barbara Sonneborn was on a trip to visit the site where her husband died. The film is staged around the trip where she interviewed dozen Vietnamese war dead widows whose appearances mingled with a dozen American women whose husbands also died in the same war.

The documentary was shown on Channel 9 (KQED) of the PBS in North California at 9:00 PM on Monday, January 24.

The camera followed her steps on the train along Central Vietnam coastal areas. Beside the present time beautiful scenes of green rice fields spreading towards the foothills far away, the film is interspersed with footages of war images - bombing, strafing, shelling, bloody civilians, burning houses, GI's at rest and on patrols...

The theme "lingering grief of the fallen soldiers' widows" is well expressed. The American widows' opinions and words are similar to that of thousands of other women whose husbands and sons were sent to Vietnam to fight a war they couldn't understand whether it served the ultimate interests of the American people. Their roles in the films probably are nothing new to American viewers.

What frustrated most of the Vietnamese in America was about the unbalanced and unfair representation of the 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers who fought and died, and more than 100,000 of their widows, and some half a million parents of theirs, who have been suffering the worst of war since long before the Americans came and more than one fourths a century after the Americans withdrew.

That does not include those who were killed by torture, or died from malnutrition and illnesses without minimum medical treatment in prison camps so-called re-education camps after the war ended in April 1975. Moreover, South Vietnam disabled veterans' wives are still incurring hardships of supporting their crippled husbands in an atmosphere of political discrimination, unwritten but palpable violations of human rights.

All the Vietnamese women in the interviews but one are the widows of fighting men on the Vietnam Communist side, plus some others who only witnessed the atrocities on the South Vietnamese side and a Communist female local official who only acted as a propaganda cadre.

The film, as introduced by many film reviews, is about what happened to the women whose beloved husbands were killed in Vietnam. According to them, there is no talk of ideology, or of Communism. Mrs. Sonneborn also said in an interview that the film is not about politics, only about war and what war means to her and other war widows.

What are seen in the documentary belie many of that. The Vietnamese women relate their stories in a tone smacked of the Vietnam Communist propaganda and slanderous arguments that might not be fully felt from the English translation.

Nguyen Ngoc Xuan, introduced as the widow of a South Vietnamese soldier who was killed in war, talked very little about how, why and where her husband lost his life. The 99 percent of her statement is about how American and South Vietnamese soldiers were killing innocent people. In fact, she is speaking for the Communist side, not a word for the cause of her late husband's side.

Her speech seemed to be written by some one with education much higher than hers. A woman like her who left Vietnam as an adult and has been living 30 years in America without a college degree in literature could hardly acquired ability of expressing such intellectual thoughts.

Moreover, Xuan's background is not a typical woman that could represent the hundred thousands of South Vietnamese soldiers' widows. If the film makers had really wanted a more typical war widows from the South Vietnamese side, they could have selected some among thousands of those who are living in Western countries, particularly in California, and ten of thousands more who are in Vietnam. And as balance and fairness are concerned, at least an equal number of war widows of both sides - or three sides, to be exact - should have been interviewed in the documentary.

As to the war footage, only chilling scenes of the South Vietnamese and the American bombing and killing are skillfully shown as background for interviews. There is not a single frame of what the Communist side did to innocent civilians.

In war, atrocities committed by soldiers of each side should be denounced and condemned. But overlooking horrible assassinations done by VC secret agents to unarmed civilians while emphasizing only killing done by the South Vietnamese side should be considered as a sinful action abetting the war criminals.

In the film, a female Communist local official showed Mrs. Sonneborn a hillside where she said Sonnerborn's first husband was killed. How could she know was not explained. In battle, only a few comrades-in-arms of a KIA fighting beside him, or sometimes by army records, could tell exactly where one was killed. Without explanation, it is doubtful that a Communist local is not telling the lies.

In short, "Regret to Inform" has expressed the true feeling about war by the American war widows, even if the feeling might be leading to their different opinions. However, on the darker side of the stories, the Vietnamese women in the film only contribute to the propaganda scheme of the Vietnam Communist side. For the last 45 years, the Vietnam Communist Party's principal strategy of counter-propaganda is to say the least possible about their arch enemy, the anti-Communist South Vietnamese.

As a common sense, any discussion of a conflict should have representation of all opposing sides. Honesty and conscience dictate that all facts and different causes in the Vietnam War must be considered without bias.

The former South Vietnamese republic might have had bad leaders, but its soldiers were fighting bravely for its cause and still are suffering terrible agonies resulting from the war. Those who were killed in a war despite the cause they were serving, should be respected, and ignorance of them is a sinful behavior wherever freedom of speech is advocated.

What's happening in Vietnam under the Communist rulers - ill-management, rampant corruption, bad human rights records, and nearly 100,000 refugees who lost their lives on high seas or in dense jungles on their ways fleeing Vietnam - could have made most people in the world understand the true nature of the Vietnam War. But some people still overlook the truth.

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