Unknown Soldier Posted by Michael Signer

I'm up at my 10th college reunion right now -- boy, is this going to be weird -- so can't post as elaborately as I'd like.  So I'd like just to write about an extraordinary documentary I just saw. 

The film is titled Unknown Soldier, and it was directed by John Hulme, who's the step-brother of my friend Sarah, who invited me and a lot of our other law school friends to the screening last night.  The film will be showing on HBO.  You can find the showtimes and a preview here.  And the film's own website is here.

John Hulme's father, Jack, died in Vietnam when he was 24 years old -- while Hulme's mother was pregnant with John.  The documentary follows John's search to discover his father and, we find, to discover a little about himself as well. 

At face value, I thought this plot sounded like it could be overly sentimental.  But what was particularly affecting for me about Hulme's film was his starting point.  He had turned off his emotions for his father, who he never knew.  He and his mother had rarely discussed him.  His beginning attitude, captured on film, is all Gen-X'y, very pre-Jed Purdy ironic, very mocking of the notion of anything smacking of tragedy.

As he hunts down his father's buddies from the war (Jack was a Marine, and a died-in-the-wool one, at that, who was playing the Marine Corps Hymn while he was in college) and gets to know his mother a little better (her kind, humorous, soft reminiscences of Jack become wrenching when she breaks into tears on camera remembering when the black sedan showed up to tell her he had died), and interviews Jack's conservative Catholic, deeply patriotic parents (his grandmother says to him, kindly and with a touch of reprimand, "Now you understand us") we watch as John's fleeting appointment with history turns into a marriage.

Watching John get to know his father -- a thirtysomething film director meeting, through a tissue of interviews, ancient memories, and a mother's transparently powerful love for a lost husband, his 24-year-old father -- was almost unbearably moving.

More than that, it all made me wonder how we'll consider Iraq in the future.  Some of the dynamics are similar, even parallel.  But domestic resentment about Iraq hasn't even gotten close to the rebellious surge triggered by Vietnam.  (Jack Hulme wore his Marine whites to his college graduation -- the only one who did -- and a group of professors and students walked out). 

I can't say I have any answers, only questions.  In 30 years, will the sons and daughters of our American casualties in Iraq have to wade through a marsh of pain and regret, to find their parents?  Or will they say, "My dad was in Iraq" with the same pride my father did of my grandfather's service as a jeep mechanic in Europe, "My dad was in World War II"?

The film closes with John and his mother visiting the exact site in Vietnam where Jack was killed.  The episode is much less about the visit itself, though, than about the Vietnamese the pair befriend during their visit.  As they observe, with wonderment, the Vietnamese are a joyful people, easy to laugh, and eager to know.  The pain lingers, underneath, but relationships are built quickly.

The film also made me think about the whole definition-of-the-left question that's preoccupied us here at Democracy Arsenal.  The eagerness to establish a connection, to link hands with other humans while traversing the wreckage of the past -- I identify this as the deepest impulse characterizing "the left," if that makes any sense at all.  This is why the communitarian movement, quirky as it was, got so well at the ultimate aims of liberalism, while libertarianism, with Ayn Rand and all the rest, builds on selfishness, hostility, and suspicion -- not hope and progress.  There's nothing weak or limp-wristed in the fusion of a broader, more serious, more compassionate comprehension of conflict and post-conflict history, and the left. 

And a final thought the film provoked:  I think that in our echo-chamber-media-celebrity-struck life, we too often fail to realize that we are, after all, not only living in history, but creating it.  And our children will live in the world we create.  To me, this should elicit a little more concentration and repose, and a little less ideology and frenzy.

A Vietnam vet was in the audience last night and, teary-eyed, thanked John Hulme (who answered questions after the screening).  John thanked him, in turn, in what was a quiet moment for all of us, ripe with focus and concentration.  There were a lot of "liberals" in the audience, but this was a serious, contemplative moment for a serious, contemplative film. 

The film premieres on HBO this Monday.  I strongly encourage you to see it, and to come to your own conclusions -- or questions.

Comments

[LCGillies]

Thanks for this post. I don't know if I can watch the piece. My next college reunion will by my 30th, so my perspective is a bit different---though Vietnam Vets we more like my older brothers in terms of generational counting.

I think that the memory of Iraq will be somewhere between that of WW2 and Vietnam. We were attacked---like WW2---and even though there was no relationship between 9/11 and Iraq (except in Cheney's and the Wolf's and GWB's fevered ambitions) the popular mind will conflate the attack and the subsequent war.

But for a long time, the Vietnam war was broadly supported. And when more and more people started to see who rotten it was, there was not only a reaction against the government but a kind of self-loathing.

In Iraq, we are seeing a very different dynamic on the home front. It has been deeply unpopular almost from the start. So I think that soldiers will not be viewed as baby-killers, through the lens of our popular self-loathing, but as brave victims of a deluded, or worse, criminal, leadership.

In any case, there is no recovery from a sense of useless waste in any of these war efforts---just a different sense of who's to blame.

[bob mcmanus]

Thank you for this post. I was moved. I will watch the documentary.

[Kristina]

This documentary made me go through a box of tissues and I don't think I've ever cried so much in my life. I enjoyed every minute of it.

[Jackie Morris]

My Dad flew helicopters in Vietnam ... he doesn't talk about it much, only that I know he is a changed person from it and will never be the same. This documentary was very touching and I felt that I could relate to so much of it. My father is still alive, however I feel that there was a part of him lost during this war, thus a part of him that I never had the opportunity to see.

[Jackie Morris]

My Dad flew helicopters in Vietnam ... he doesn't talk about it much, only that I know he is a changed person from it and will never be the same. This documentary was very touching and I felt that I could relate to so much of it. My father is still alive, however I feel that there was a part of him lost during this war, thus a part of him that I never had the opportunity to see.

[Beth Gartenmayer]

Wow! What a powerful documentary, it brought me to tears, I really enjoyed the Grandmother.

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