Winter Soldier

WINTER SOLDIER — *** 1/2 — Documentary feature about the Vietnam Veterans Against the War organization; in black and white; not rated, probable R (violence, profanity, vulgarity).

First released in 1972, "Winter Solder" is a cinema-verite documentary made during the public hearings organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The participants included disillusioned soldiers who'd returned from their tours with nightmarish accounts of cruel and unusual American military behavior. The film was well received in Europe. Stateside, it opened at one Manhattan theater and aired only on New York City public television (ABC, CBS, NBC, and nearly every other PBS outlet passed).

Why the networks looked the other way is obvious. "Winter Soldier" is infuriating, its testimonies depressingly surreal. The searing first-person accounts reach each branch of the American military, creating a harrowing oral indictment.

Most of the testimony recounts the soldiers' rape, torture, murder and unrelenting dehumanization of Vietnamese civilians. It's hard to imagine any network daring to show this now, let alone four decades ago, not only for political reasons but because the descriptions of the atrocities are so graphic.

The Winter Soldier Investigation took place in 1971 over three late-January and early February days in a Detroit hotel. About 125 young men, among them John Kerry, showed up to speak to receptive audiences. And on panels organized by VVAW, in interviews with the filmmakers (a then-anonymous collective called Winterfilm), and in conversations caught on film, the soldiers are a motley mix of races, classes and degrees of self-expression. Since their war duties, they've grown beards and let their hair grow out. (One interviewer asks a soldier if the veterans' cause will be taken seriously when so many of the men look more like hippies than soldiers.)

The predominant mood of the panelists is complicated. They speak in a kind of resigned anger. They no longer believe in the war, but many of them are still visibly in shock over what they've done: burning down villages, for example, and slaughtering civilians to meet "kill quotas," for which the prize is R and R. More than one man suggests that he was brainwashed.

The film, shot in black and white on 16mm, intersperses these recollections with war footage and photographs that, pointedly, don't seem to make a distinction between the Vietcong and the American soldiers. One shot of a bomb falling on a hut is heart-stopping. In its antiwar anti-war sentiments, the film is a precursor to 1974's "Hearts and Minds," Peter Davis's more kaleidoscopic consideration of Vietnam.

Clearly, the resurrection of "Winter Soldier" is timely. The film's tight focus on willful civilian abuse evokes the situation at Abu Ghraib. It also arrives at a moment when the war in Iraq has reached a bitter milestone, having taken the lives of more than 2,000 American soldiers. The movie is a polemical document. Yet, rather indelibly, its subjects urge us to look into the politics of war and acknowledge the human faces.

"Winter Soldier" is not rated but would probably receive an R for newsreel footage of war violence and graphic descriptions of war atrocities. Running time: 95 minutes.