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Why did America really enter the war in Vietnam? What exactly did they do while they were there? And how did the war affect the American collective consciousness? These are the questions that director Peter Davis sought to explore in his Oscar-winning, anti-war documentary ‘Hearts and Minds’ (1974). A masterful arrangement of newsreels, archive footage and new material, the film is an emotive critique of America’s involvement in Vietnam and of war in general. Controversial since its 1974 release, the film has often been castigated and dismissed as anti-American propaganda. Though it is undeniably critical of American foreign policy towards Vietnam, Davis’s themes transcend superficial disparagement of the US government and military, constructing an analysis of cultural warfare, independent of conflicting ideologies. Irrespective of its obligatory political context, Davis’s film is a human drama about the absence of respect, understanding and tolerance.
From the opening scenes, Davis’s overt political stance is laid bare. A sequence of uncomplicated images depicts daily life in the typically South Vietnamese village of Hung Dinh - a small horse pulls a simple carriage along the dirt tracks of the settlement; two young children hop across the dusty paths with their school satchels tucked under their arms; a woman wearing a straw hat carries bushels on a pole over her shoulders; a group of workers in a field harvest the crop. And then, unexpectedly, a South Vietnamese soldier wanders through the foreground, an intruder in the idyll. He does not belong in the scene and his sudden appearance disrupts the viewer. A result of the US policy of Vietnamisation, he is a symbol of extrication, remoteness, the void between simple living and the convolutions of war. Walking through the frame with an absent-minded demeanour, his detachment is a microcosm of US foreign policy in South-East Asia. For Davis, the incongruity of the soldier’s presence is a reflection of the remoteness with which successive American governments understood and engaged with the Vietnamese people and their cultural identity.
Davis is undeniably critical of the imposition of the philosophical ideals of one civilisation onto another and of America’s detachment from the consequences of their catastrophic campaign. He suggests that, through their policies and actions, the US government, its generals, and soldiers unashamedly demonstrated that, to them, the lives of the Vietnamese were cheap. Take the following carefully constructed sequence: Lieutenant George Coker and former Captain Randy Floyd describe the thrill of flying bombing missions over Vietnam. Coker continues to narrate over images of US aircraft in flight. We then see pictures of Vietnamese villagers filling water buckets from a well and a group of Vietnamese children strolling through the village. Here, Coker underscores his descriptions, proudly exclaiming that successful bomb drops are “deeply satisfying”. Cut to a sequence of explosions, a villager shows the empty hole where his farm once stood, and a grief-stricken woman gives a tour of her home, now reduced to piles of broken bricks and bits of wood. For Coker, killing Vietnamese civilians and destroying their homes was “all business, strictly professionalism”. His arrogance is infuriating. He fails to conceive of war as anything other than a means of achieving military objectives. He is the quintessential unquestioning, obedient foot soldier, and (later in the film) the fact that he is actively encouraged to unleash his ignorance onto pliable American schoolchildren is one of most exasperating sequences in the documentary.
The war is inextricably bound to Vietnamese culture and history. Their civilisation is accustomed to outside aggression from would-be, foreign invaders. They have lived with the realities of war even if they do not understand it. For twelve centuries the Vietnamese fought with the Chinese. Another century was spent resisting their French colonial oppressors. For the majority of the North and South Vietnamese, the Vietnam conflict was a war of independence from American imperialists who they saw as analogous to the Chinese and French. This is something that the invading Americans didn’t understand. By juxtaposing Vietnamese cultural history with America’s own war of independence, Davis draws attention to the hypocrisy and ignorance of many average Americans. The Vietnamese were fighting for the exact same reasons as Americans had 200 years earlier. We are reminded that countless Americans had risked and lost their lives in their war with Britain. Naturally, for Americans their eventual success remains a fecund source of patriotism and pride – it marks the implementation of their democratic ideals and the consolidation of national and individual liberties. As we see in ‘Hearts and Minds’, this is an event worthy of large scale, lavish re-enactments, such as the one in Croton, New Jersey. Hordes of Americans gather to dress up in full period costume and recreate infamous battles. With fanfare and cannons, they celebrate their historic severance from an oppressive colonial power. Davis draws parallels where ordinary Americans are apparently unable or unwilling to. According to one, the only similarity between the American war of independence and the Vietnam War is that people are killing and being killed; he sniggers at the thought of “Oriental politics”. A sequence of short interviews with average Americans shows that not only has the Vietnam War not affected their lives in any way, in some cases they are not even aware of who they are fighting for.
Far from being a condemnation of all Americans, Davis makes a clear distinction between those that have learnt lessons from their experiences of the war and those who have not. Randy Floyd, Daniel Ellsberg, Robert Muller and others are given space to reflect, to regret and to cry. Their redemption is their own. On the other hand, the Americans who have not learnt lessons are given space to debase and ridicule themselves. While George Coker is presented as a mindless automaton, perhaps the most effective indictment is that of General William Westmoreland, commander of the American forces in Vietnam. At the end of the film, he is sitting comfortably next to a serene and picturesque lake. He says that the Vietnamese do not value life as highly as Americans. Interjected with scenes of a devastated young Vietnamese boy sobbing over his dead father’s coffin and a grief-stricken woman trying to crawl into the grave of her son, Westmoreland’s upright posture and confident manner infuse his words with imprudent arrogance. Davis cannot possibly misrepresent Westmoreland in this scene; the damning words are Westmoreland’s own. He is a character of despicable conceit and, as a military leader with undeniable influence over millions of people, his judgements transform the viewer’s antipathy into disbelief.
To appreciate Davis’s critique of assumed notions of civilised society in ‘Hearts and Minds’, it is useful to consider the average American’s perception of Vietnam and its people before and during the war years. By the 1960s and with television sets in almost every American home, the war was beamed into living rooms of ordinary households with unprecedented coverage. But, focusing on the triumphs of the US forces, the American media portrayed the Vietnamese superficially – they were either enemies or allies and they were as shallow and simple as that. The Vietnamese people were unrefined, backward folk; their culture was distant, uncivilised, even savage. America was the motivating force, the civilised nation bringing liberty to a people who were unable to help themselves. It is disturbing (but nevertheless unsurprising) that these ideas were prevalent in American society during the war; and this notion was by no means limited to US civilians. Throughout ‘Hearts and Minds’, Vietnam veterans describe their own equally inauspicious reasons for going to war. Randy Floyd was taught that the father of communist ideology Karl Marx was a cruel man who used to “make his family suffer”; Robert Muller enlisted out of patriotic obligation to defend the ideals of his country; Daniel Ellsberg genuinely felt that they were helping the people of Vietnam to escape communism, it was the “unquestioned assumption”. There follows a sequence of American anti-communist propaganda films which, with a 21st century perspective, are nothing but hilarious. Nevertheless, media outlets and policymakers reassured Americans that the objective of the war was to rid South-East Asia of the threat of communism, to bring freedom to the Vietnamese people and, by extension, to allow them to develop a civilisation as rich and sophisticated as American society.
It is sobering to consider that similar reasons were tossed around to justify the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both again with large numbers civilian casualties and significant cultural destruction. Davis identified the absurdity and arrogance inherent in the viewpoint. In ‘Hearts and Minds’, Davis atypically created a space for the humanity of the Vietnamese people to reveal itself to Western audiences (in particular American audiences); and, in turn, for those Western viewers to reflect on and examine their own sense of humanity. We sympathise with the farmer in Hung Dinh who has lost his home and livelihood in the bombings; we feel compassion for the two South Vietnamese sisters mourning the death of their older sister; we feel surges of guilt as the North Vietnamese man urges the camera crew to take the shirt of his dead daughter to President Nixon; and the young boy wailing inconsolably at his father’s burial ceremony is genuinely distressing to watch. Not only do these people work, eat and sleep like everyone else - they experience pain and loss, they mourn, and they suffer. Davis’s sophisticated and sympathetic treatment of the Vietnamese, both those from the North and the South, showed a significant portion of ordinary Americans that those distant, uncivilised folks (and in some cases enemies) were human beings after all, and that their lives existed outside and irrespective of opposing Cold War ideologies. This process of identification is perhaps largely responsible for the backlash against the film. When people are made to feel uncomfortable about their preconceived ideas, they have a tendency to see it as an attack on their fundamental beliefs. As the monk Thich Lieu Minh says in the film, with 5,000 years of history it is not the Vietnamese who are the “savages”.
Originally referring to the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, the film’s title is taken from a favourite sound bite of American war-time president Lyndon B. Johnson. Davis however extends its meaning to include not only US policymakers, the military and American citizens, but by implication includes all human beings with a moral conscience capable of reflection. ‘Hearts and Minds’ goes beyond preaching to the converted by forcing any conscientious person to examine their own culture, their history and future, and how we relate to other members of our species. It is as relevant to today’s global debates on cultural understanding and mutual tolerance as it was upon its release over 30 years ago. Whatever your political persuasion, ‘Hearts and Minds’ is certainly not a passive viewing experience. It is not a film about sterile facts, trite statistics or journalistic balance; instead, it is a personal perspective of extreme human suffering, the unfathomable inhumanity of war and, more specifically, the cataclysmic clash of two distinct civilisations.
Country: USA
Budget: £500,000
Length: 112mins
Pub/2008
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