Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam

Using the medium of letters sent home by American soldiers (many of whom did not survive long thereafter), DEAR AMERICA takes only 84 minutes to relate America's 10-year quagmire in southeast Asia, wasting thousands of men in an increasingly incomprehensible war that the United States could neither win nor quit. Early dispatches (circa 1965) are optimistic and naive, as young recruits--median age was 19--speak glowingly of the natural beauty of Indochina, even of the insects. Others grow fond of the native Vietnamese whom they are supposedly protecting, and by extension, shielding Main Street USA from the invading Communist hordes of the north. As time goes by and casualties mount, however, it's clear this is not such a simple conflict. The friendly South Vietnamese and the hostile North Vietnamese become more difficult to tell apart. US forces are pinned down by NVA fire at Khe Sanh, a brutal siege that makes Washington consider a nuclear response. The enemy shows further strength in the January 1968 Tet Offensive, in which the Viet Cong, supposedly contained, rise up and simultanously strike cities throughout US- occupied South Vietnam, even the American embassy in Saigon. The US troops' ebbing confidence is reflected in the letters, which change their tone from bewilderment to anger and despair. Events back home "in the world," like antiwar protests and the assassination of Martin Luther King, further undermine the fighting spirit, until a soldier's goal is to survive at any cost. Finally, a shaky peace treaty brings the remaining American forces back home, but it will take years--and the construction of the somber Vietnam memorial in Washington DC--to overcome their sense of shame and loss.

Read against a well-chosen backdrop of historical footage, the letters (initially compiled by associate producer Bernard Edelman in a 1985 book) range from dry to maudlin to poetic to bitter and/or satirical. Some originate from nurses, others from American prisoners in Hanoi, and one particularly emotional missive near the end comes from a mother to her slain son. To recite them the filmmakers corralled a remarkable lineup of actors, and therein lies the problem with DEAR AMERICA. Superstars of the silver screen are listed right up front, and the viewer's attention is continually distracted way from the content of the movie to the identity of the voices, in a banal, involuntary game of spot-the-star, made compulsive by the fact that many of these same performers played roles in major Vietnam-oriented movies. Hey, that's Martin Sheen (APOCALYPSE NOW) as a POW, or Michael J. Fox (CASUALTIES OF WAR) at his gosh-golly-gee-est, reading the melancholy words of PFC Raymond Griffith, killed on the Fourth of July as he pined away for the girlfriend he left back home. One's thoughts should be more with Griffith, less with his big-name impersonator.

While some of the archival footage is haunting, as documentaries go DEAR AMERICA offers little that deviates from the popular history of US involvement in southeast Asia; the only surprise is that the too-brief narrative skips over the 1975 fall of Saigon and only hints at the years of public silence and derision that greeted returned Vietnam vets. Hollywood itself didn't help; until THE DEER HUNTER (1978) and even afterwards, the common media depictions of the men who wrote these wrenching letters were as unsympathetic horror-movie deviants and traumatized psychos. DEAR AMERICA: LETTERS HOME FROM VIETNAM pays only a small debt toward healing a generation's wounds that may never stop hurting. (Profanity, violence, adult situations.) leave a comment