Veterans Return to Vietnam to Confront Loss, Begin Healing

On New Year’s Day 1998, 75 men and women, American and Vietnamese, many of them veterans wounded in the war, formed a team of bicyclists and hand-cyclists to make a 16-day, 1,200-mile expedition from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. The event was sponsored by World T.E.A.M. (The Exceptional Athlete Matters), a North Carolina-based nonprofit organization that stages high-profile athletic events to demonstrate what people with disabilities can accomplish when given the opportunity.

Filmmakers Jerry Blumenthal, Peter Gordon and Gordon Quinn--the last two worked on “Hoop Dreams”--followed the expedition and came away with “Vietnam: Long Time Coming,” a strong, straightforward documentary that covers as much emotional terrain as it does beautiful rural Vietnamese landscape.

Not surprisingly, the film focuses on the American Vietnamese war veterans, for whom the experience is truly wrenching but seems ultimately healing. These are middle-aged men--plus two Army nurses--who are confronted with profoundly conflicting feelings of pride and shame in serving their country and who are dealing with permanent disabilities on account of that service or with lingering emotional scars or both.

These are individuals who have lost limbs or have been left partly or totally without sight; in some cases, they are revisiting the places where they were injured. All of them survived hellish experiences and witnessed terrible losses. A team of post-traumatic stress specialists is traveling with them, its skills needed. The vets are warned that not all the Vietnamese may greet them kindly, but this proves not to be the case. As one forthright Vietnamese woman puts it, “There is an old Vietnamese saying: We fight against those who run away but not those who return.”

In the course of the arduous journey, several individuals capture the filmmakers’ attention. The most emotional of the veterans is burly former Marine Duane Wagner, who lost both his legs below his knees. Prostheses have allowed him to walk and move, but he struggles with a sense of lack of completeness.

Then there’s Dan Jensen, a soldier with the airborne infantry, who lost his right foot on a mine field and who admits he sealed Vietnam off in his mind and heart until his return there. He bonds with a Vietnamese veteran with the same injury--and vows that he will get him a better artificial limb.

The pivotal experience is a side trip to the site of the My Lai massacre, where apparently the only American veteran willing to enter the grounds of its monument site is an African American who says later that he would like to experience the sense of solidarity with all races in America that he is experiencing in Vietnam. The others regard the massacre with horror but feel that it needs to be seen in context. The visit is tremendously unsettling to the veterans, although none of them participated in the massacre.

“Vietnam: Long Time Coming” is a constant test of the filmmakers’ judgment. The event and the filming of it are sure-fire heart-tuggers, but the filmmakers resist manipulation. There are times when you fear they are about to cross the line and invade the privacy of individuals experiencing emotional torment, but they always pull back. The film reveals the terrible toll war can exact even decades after it is over, and it celebrates the capacity of people to build bridges with former enemies. One veteran remarks upon departing, “Vietnam was a war to me, now it’s a country.”

* Unrated. Times guidelines: The film deals deeply with the trauma of war and has some strong language.

‘Vietnam: Long Time Coming’

A Seventh Art release of a World T.E.A.M. Sports and Sports Illustrated, Kartemquin Films and Longshot Films presentation. Producers-directors Jerry Blumenthal, Peter Gilbert, Gordon Quinn. Executive producers Jim Benson, Paulette Douglas, Steve Whisnant. Cinematographers Gilbert, Quinn, Tran Le Tien. Editors David Simpson, Jan Sutcliff, Sharon Karp, Bob Schneiger. Music Ben Sidran. Narrator Joe Mantegna. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.

Exclusively at the Aero Theater, 1328 Montana Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 395-4990.