The Kopkind Blog

Please tell others about this piece and our screening in October. Thank you. John Scagliotti, Kopkind Administrator and JoAnn Wypijewski, President of the Board.

[Note: For those who would like to come to Vermont for this special ocassion, one should make reservations now as most hotels fill up during the leaves in color in Vermont. We have a few rooms left at Kopkind too so contact john@afterstonewall.com]
HEARTS AND MINDS REDUX
By Peter Davis
To frame Hearts and Minds in an historical context, we in the United States commenced to re-live the experience of Vietnam, this time with Great Britain at our side, in March 2003. Differences in geography, ethnicity, religion and history make the wars in Vietnam and Iraq very different. The political and economic stakes, of course, are so grossly, dramatically different as to bring on indigestion for either those who support or those who oppose the war in Iraq.
The similarities are only these: First, we flew into both wars on the wings of lies (the Gulf of Tonkin ‘incidents’ in 1964 versus the non-existent weapons of mass destruction and equally non-existent alliance between the secular Saddam Hussein and the fervent Muslim Osama bin Laden in 2003). Second, we have failed to understand those very elements – geography, ethnicity, religion, history – that we also got very wrong in Vietnam. When I reported from Iraq in 2003, these truths were so self-evident that a fully rational response would have had to include both laughter and tears. The ghost of the philosopher Santayana might have been heard droning across the Mesopotamian desert: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’
The past then. At the time I began making Hearts and Minds in 1972, Vietnam had already surpassed the 18th Century rebellion against Great Britain – our ‘revolution’ – as America’s longest war. Few in the United States any longer wanted the war to continue, and President Nixon had reduced American troops from over half a million under President Johnson to less than 100,000. Bombing continued unabated. The idea was to turn the ground war over to the South Vietnamese who were fighting their compatriots from what was then North Vietnam as well as the Viet Cong in South Vietnam itself. Vietnamisation, as it was called, similar to the present Iraqisation, was the doctrine encapsulated in the ancient adage, ‘Let’s you and him fight.’
For several months my colleagues and I did research that involved reading, looking at footage from this most filmed of all wars, and traveling around the U.S. in the hope of taking the moral temperature of the country in terms of patriotism, national identity, and how people felt about the war itself. At length I winnowed all this down to three questions I wanted the film to address. They were these: Why did we go to Vietnam in the first place? What was it we actually did there? And what did this doing in turn do to us?
Hearts and Minds neither asks nor answers these questions. They are never mentioned in the film itself. Nothing dates so quickly, nor so distances the audience from the scene itself, as the narration of most documentaries. I wanted to make an experiential film, not an explanatory one. Yet each sequence in Hearts and Minds is inspired by those three questions and attempts to address one or more of them. Though I now knew these questions, I still didn’t know how to make the film.
My first day in Vietnam I was taken by our researcher to a bombed village not far from what was then Saigon. I was only looking around; we were not filming yet. The villagers were trying to gather their belongings into the few homes that had not been destroyed. In a bomb crater perhaps 25 or 30 feet across I saw a bicycle wrapped around the remains of a tree. A large cooking bowl, glazed in bright colors, lay in several cracked pieces near the bicycle. Then I saw an arm, a leg, another leg, a torso, the other arm, and finally the head of a child’s doll scattered around the crater. I’d seen no wounded human being, not even a dead animal. Yet somehow those objects – the bent bicycle, the shards of a cooking pot, and the child’s doll – all told a war story to me, and in that moment I felt completely de-politicized, un-opinionated, about the rights or wrongs of either side in the war. If I had been a praying person I have asked God to let the Americans win, or let the North Vietnamese win, or let there be an agreed stalemate, but please let it happen now. Let there be no more bomb craters nor the things that bomb craters make you imagine.
In the next moment I also recognized something about war coverage in general and about the way I wanted to make the film. American television networks were showing craters like the one I was looking at, and far worse. The horrors of war were not hidden from the American public. The way television covered the war was to begin the scene just as it had hit me. The camera focuses on the bicycle twisted around the tree. It pulls back to reveal the broken cooking bowl and goes on with its reverse zoom to show the severed limbs of the doll and the entire bomb crater. The camera continues to pull back until, in the foreground, a reporter stands. As he begins to speak – it was almost always a ‘he’ in Vietnam – the television audience no longer experiences the war’s actual effects.
At this point the audience hears the reporter explain how the village was bombed because there were Communists in it, or was bombed perhaps by mistake, or the Communists were killed here or they ran away. The more eloquent his explanation, the more we are in his capable hands as we take in facts and form opinions. Whoever has been killed and whatever has been destroyed in this village, the reporter himself is well put together, nicely turned out in pressed fatigues, and we can safely identify with him, the true experience of the war now mercifully removed from our presence. Before we saw the reporter, we had actually seen something of the war itself for perhaps ten or fifteen seconds, the length of time it took the camera to pull back from the close-up of the bicycle wrapped around the tree. This fifteen seconds is what American television executives call ‘dead air,’ and they hate it. They want that reporter front and center before the audience attention has a chance to wander, to click perhaps to another channel where the news is cheerier.
But that long moment while the camera seemed to be by itself, educational but unaccompanied by pedantry, meant everything to me in terms of experience and feelings. I decided that day I’d make a complete film about those fifteen seconds of ‘dead air.’ Hearts and Minds, for better or worse, is the result.
Back to the present. When I was in Iraq it was hard to find ordinary citizens, regardless of how much they had suffered under the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein, who did not despise the sight of Coalition troops patrolling their streets and riding around their homes in tanks. A group of villagers in northern Iraq, who welcomed American troops at first, had turned bitter and hostile after their neighborhood had been shot up, their homes searched and several of them beaten one night by American soldiers suspecting them of being members of Saddam’s Baath Party. “We thought it was a joke at first until they broke down the door,” one man told me. “No American ever was tortured by Saddam’s thugs like I was. I hated the bastard, and now I hate the bastards who replaced him.”
Leaving a mosque in Baghdad one day after hearing the supposedly moderate imam preach that it was the duty of every Iraqi to oppose Coalition forces with violence, I asked an Iraqi who had become a friend if he thought the entire war had been a mistake. “Not exactly,” said this man who had a Shia father and a Sunni mother. “Saddam Hussein was like cancer and the invasion by the Americans and the British was chemotherapy.” Did that mean he saw us, now that Saddam was gone, as liberators? “Absolutely not,” he said. “You are occupiers who have done everything wrong since chasing Saddam out of his palace. When the cancer is gone, chemotherapy only makes us sicker. The sooner you are out of here the better.”
My friend angrily criticized midnight bombings of homes containing only grandparents and their grandchildren after someone had fired a grenade down the block. The Anglo-American policy I observed in Iraq appeared aimed less toward peace than pacification, and the Iraqis are demonstrably less pacified this year than last, and last year than the year before.
Reflections of our current position in Iraq can be found both in Vietnam, where American soldiers could never be certain if villagers were friends or foes, and in Iraq itself. Following World War I, T. E. Lawrence filed a dispatch to the Sunday Times of London describing British policy in what is today Iraq. “The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap,” Lawrence wrote, “from which it will be difficult to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.”
Let us pause for the naming of places. When we hear Basra, Najaf, Samarra, Kirkuk, Mosul, Fallujah, and Ramadi, along with the daily dispatch from Baghdad, are we not reminded of Danang, Hue, Pleiku, Cam Ranh Bay, Bien Hoa, Hanoi, Haiphong, and wartime Saigon? The names return as insistent echoes in the recesses of our inner ear, old melodies, as if they were our auditory madeleines. But Iraqis have made their own judgment. A thoroughfare in Sadr City, Baghdad’s huge slum, has been renamed Vietnam Street.
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