Charles Petzold

I see in Newsweek (4/6/09, pg. 8) that Peter Davis's 1975 Academy Award winning documentary Hearts and Minds is being re-released. Deirdre and I watched the film on DVD a couple years ago and found that it still holds up quite well.

I reviewed Hearts and Minds for the April 11, 1975 issue of The Stute, the student newspaper of the Stevens Institute of Technology, where I was then a senior, and here is that review. I have not attempted to correct any faulty grammar or improve the writing.

HEARTS AND MINDS
Film Documentary of Vietnam
by Charles R. Petzold, '75

Hearts and Minds — an Academy Award winning feature length documentary about Vietnam now playing at Cinema II — has more than the simple purpose of satisfying an historical curiosity about America's involvement in the war. It is an important film to see, I think, lest we inadvertently fall victim to the Santayana dictum about learning the lessons of the past or being condemned to repeat it. In this film a Viet Vet is asked if America has learned anything from the Vietnam War. “We're trying not to,” he replies.

Peter Davis, who directed Hearts and Minds, also made the television documentary Selling of the Pentagon several years ago. Everything in this earlier film had been said before (much of the information parallels William Fulbright's book The Pentagon Propaganda Machine), but the way in which Davis chose to illustrate his points made the documentary immediately more effective and finally more controversial than any text could ever be. Much of the same technique shows up in Hearts and Minds — events and people are contrasted and exposed by unrelentingly crafty editing; a subject who may have said a few comments in a certain context will find his remarks placed in the film so as to completely lay bar the idiocy (or the brilliance) of his arguments. Hearts and Minds will leave more than a few people unhappy. In fact, Columbia refused to distribute the film (it was eventually sold to Warner Bros.) and Walt Rostow, the former Johnson advisor, tried to stop the film in court. He objected to the sequence in Hearts and Minds where he was asked by Davis why we were in Vietnam. Rostow becomes visibly irritated and calls the question “silly” and “sophomoric.”

Hearts and Minds is a film montage of images and people. The editing takes us from old newsreels and anti-communist movies to the streets of Saigon; to Reagan and Hoover and J. McCarthy telling us of the fight against communism; to Dan Ellsberg and J. William Fulbright; to the devastation of a Vietnam farm; to the public lies of five Presidents; to a P.O.W. parade in Linden, N.J.; to generals and soldiers and deserters; to football games where “to win” is the only criteria of judgment; to peace rallies; to napalm burned children; to Americans destroying homes with flame-throwers; to Bob Hope entertaining former prisoners of war. This juxtaposition of images and dialogue creates an unbelievable tension in the clash of viewpoints and the conflict of rhetoric. The question that Rostow calls “silly” is explored by Fulbright in a lengthy discussion of how Ho Chi Minh had believed that the U.S. would aid his fight against imperialist France because his struggle for national independence so closely paralleled America's own war against the British. Daniel Ellsberg takes a slightly different view: “We weren't on the wrong side. We are the wrong side.” For those who prefer a more Leninist interpretation of the war, there is that old film of Eisenhower explaining that we can't lose Vietnam because of its importance as a source of tin and tungsten.

There are also the more sadistic viewpoints. George S. Patton III licks his chops with a big grin and praises American soldiers as a “bloody good bunch of killers.” A Lt. Coker — the P.O.W. from Linden — shows up a lot in this film. He enthusiastically describes boming missions as “thrilling ... deeply satisfying.” The film then cuts to a Vietnam village. A farmer is standing is a pile of rubble. He doesn't know whose planes destroyed his home, whether they were Vietnamese or American. A film taken aboard a bomber shows the bombs fall, leaving brown holes in an otherwise green countryside.

Always there are the people and death. An American father beams while telling of his dead son. A Vietnamese coffin-maker hammers together wooden coffins which are but thirty inches long; he has lost seven children himself from poison gas from American planes. American bodies are pulled out of the mud and zipped into bags. Artificial limbs are manufactured and tried on. The ruins of Bach Mai Hospital are shown. A Vietnamese farmer points to the ground where his eight-year-old daughter died in a bomb blast. “What have I done to Nixon that he come here and destroy my country?” he screams in anger.

There is an unnerving scene of a Vietnamese cemetary, where rows of dug plots await coffins. There is a burial — an hysterical woman tries to join her husband as he is being buried. Everywhere there is crying, weeping, wailing Vietnamese families. A young girl cries over a coffin holding her father. The film then cuts to William Westmoreland: “The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does the westerner,” he says. Some critics have called this a cheap shot, but it is probably as fair as one can in good conscience be toward Gen. Westmoreland. The point is well made — it is Westmoreland who doesn't put a high price on Oriental life.

Throughout the film are shown interviews with former American soldiers, talking of themselves and the war. Many are disgusted with their past actions and attitudes. Towards the end of the film the camera slowly pulls away to reveal them as wheel-chair bound or without an arm or leg. They don't seem bitter, only confused and still unsure of the answer to that very basic, simple (and surely not “silly”) question: “Why?”

Many of the images in Hearts and Minds are vivid and shocking and even sickening. No one can come out of this film without feeling deeply disturbed and jolted from complacency. The film has a powerful, brutal impact, causing an emotion of agony that is difficult to deal with, and intent to make us not forget what we did in Vietnam. It strips naked the inhumanness of people like Gen. Westmoreland and Lt. Coker, who persists until the end in referring to “gooks” and how proud he was to slaughter them. Hearts and Minds is probably one of the most upsetting films ever made; but then, that is precisely why it should be seen.

Near the middle of Hearts and Minds, the ubiquitous Lt. Coker addresses a group of fifth graders in a Catholic School. He tells them that Vietnam is a great place, except for the people, that they are “backward and primitive.” Elsewhere in the film, a South Vietnamese Priest had spoken and had emphasized “It is not we who are the savages.” In seeing Hearts and Minds it is obvious that this latter statement is closer to the truth. Long after one sees the movie that statement will continue to haunt one's mind: “It is not we who are the savages.” It should haunt us all.