{"id":303615,"date":"2026-01-25T23:50:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-25T23:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/303615\/"},"modified":"2026-01-25T23:50:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-25T23:50:10","slug":"distinctive-and-moving-doc-on-the-vietnam-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/303615\/","title":{"rendered":"Distinctive and Moving Doc on the Vietnam War"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe Vietnam War<\/a> has been analyzed, litigated and relived in countless books, films and TV shows. Whether we\u2019ve learned a single lesson from the decades-long debacle is another matter. J.M. Harper\u2019s Soul Patrol, a nonfiction feature with scripted elements, doesn\u2019t pretend to offer answers; its first-person exploration of the enlisted man\u2019s experience resounds with big-picture questions about war in general and Vietnam in particular.<\/p>\n

\n\tWeaving together eloquent visuals with energy and deep feeling, Harper\u2019s second documentary<\/a> feature, after As We Speak<\/a>, delves into the memories of a half-dozen soldiers who formed a tight-knit unit tasked with some of the most dangerous missions of the conflict. They were young, some still in their teens, and they were Black soldiers at a time when the \u201creal war,\u201d as one of them calls it \u2014 the movement for Black Power and against U.S. militarism \u2014 was being waged back home.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tSoul Patrol\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tLoving tribute and dynamic memory piece.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue:<\/strong> Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Documentary Competition)
Director-screenwriter:<\/strong> J.M. Harper
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 40 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of these men, Compton native Ed Emanuel, wrote a 2003 memoir from which Soul Patrol takes its name and its inspiration. Emanuel\u2019s goal in writing it, he says, was to free himself from the \u201cdemons,\u201d haunting memories of his year in Southeast Asia. He also hoped the book\u2019s publication would help to bring together the tight-knit group he\u2019d been a part of decades earlier \u2014 Team 2\/6 of Company F, 51st Infantry. It did precisely that, and one of the elements of the film is a black-tie reunion of the surviving team members. Harper also includes a roundtable discussion, the men captured in close-ups in a black-and-white so exquisite it feels like a loving embrace (the cinematographer is Logan Triplett). Their wives receive similar treatment in a brief convo about the emotional fallout of the war.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt was Sgt. Jerry Brock, the team leader who turned out to be someone Emanuel knew from Compton, who put together the first all-Black special ops team in Vietnam. (Brock died before the group\u2019s reunion.) The team was a long-range reconnaissance patrol, or LRRP (pronounced \u201clurp\u201d), a six-man unit trained for five-day jungle forays deep behind enemy lines \u2014 \u201cmore than a SEAL, more than a Green Beret,\u201d Emanuel says. They were dubbed Soul Patrol by a colonel \u2014 not a problem for some, but offensive to Emanuel (\u201cI wasn\u2019t a soul brother, I was a soldier\u201d).<\/p>\n

\n\tBeyond Emanuel\u2019s authorship and another man\u2019s mental-health struggles, the only biographical details in the doc concern the men\u2019s youth. Thad Givens came from a military family. Lawton Mackey Jr. was a fieldworker in South Carolina earning $3 a day and the youngest of the crew; he\u2019d enlisted at 17, and regretted it upon arriving in the quagmire of Vietnam: \u201cI forged my mama\u2019s signature to get in this damn mess.\u201d Norman Reid, from the Bronx, had crossed a drug dealer and saw the Army as a relatively safe alternative to facing the consequences, while Emerson Branch, in trouble with the law, took the military option rather than be transferred from jail to the penitentiary.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt the heart of the documentary is the conflict between the men\u2019s pride in their skill, bravery and devotion and their doubts over the purported reasons for the war. Their tours began around the time of Martin Luther King\u2019s murder, and one recalls learning of Robert Kennedy\u2019s assassination on the jet to Vietnam. The growing fervor of the antiwar and Black Power movements is encapsulated here in footage of leaders including Stokely Carmichael, Harry Belafonte and Bobby Seale, and searing audio of King: \u201cAs I ponder the madness of Vietnam \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAgainst this passionate backdrop, it\u2019s jolting to hear one of the former soldiers use the phrase \u201cgive back to America\u201d and speak of the possibility of changing the system from within. Jolting and heartbreaking, given that Black soldiers\u2019 numbers and casualty rates were disproportionately high compared with their stateside population, yet they were barely mentioned in the constant media coverage of the war.<\/p>\n

\n\tActors portray the LRRP team in sequences that Harper calls \u201cadaptations.\u201d These include wartime reenactments that are notable for the way they capture the boredom, confusion, chaos and terror of the men\u2019s missions, some of which they were sent into knowing they weren\u2019t expected to survive. But the writer-director takes the doc to another level with adaptations that place the young soldiers, in battle fatigues and brandishing arms, in the aisles of a contemporary supermarket, speaking lines from Nietzsche. <\/p>\n

\n\tAt first this conceit, entwining the otherworldly intensity of war with the everyday, feels self-conscious. But the poetic leaps gather emotional force as the film proceeds. And they\u2019re a thoughtful, affecting complement to the Super 8 footage that Harper incorporates, shot by American soldiers in their off-hours on base: evocative images of young friends hanging out between impossible assignments. Working with the editing team of Byron Leon, Niles Howard and Gabriela Tessitore, Harper, who began his career as an editor<\/a>, moves among the disparate elements of his film with fluency.<\/p>\n

\n\tSoul Patrol offers an essential historical chronicle, and one that reverberates now, when there\u2019s not even a pretense that compassion and nonviolence are political ideals. It gives voice to Emanuel and his comrades, who reveal that they didn\u2019t talk about Vietnam for years. Given the mood of the country, it was hardly a heroes\u2019 welcome that they received upon returning home. They speak of the ensuing isolation, silence, rage and mistrust. \u201cWe don\u2019t allow ourselves to release the pain,\u201d Givens says, half a century later, of the combat experience.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut some of them vividly recall letting off steam during R&R in Bangkok. Emanuel, whose cousin had recently been killed in combat and who was bent on revenge against the \u201cenemy,\u201d had a revelation during those days away from the front. He was meeting working-class people \u201cjust like me,\u201d he says, and revenge suddenly felt hollow. In this film about war, told by those who survived it, it\u2019s war\u2019s futility that rings loud and clear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Vietnam War has been analyzed, litigated and relived in countless books, films and TV shows. Whether we\u2019ve…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":303616,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[2054,18,117,6319,19,17,327,16998,81227,16999,147983,9388],"class_list":{"0":"post-303615","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-documentary","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-festivals","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-movies","15":"tag-sundance","16":"tag-sundance-2026","17":"tag-sundance-film-festival","18":"tag-sundance-film-festival-reviews","19":"tag-vietnam-war"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115958423374540876","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303615\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/303616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}