Re: Off Topic War Stuff Still hurts my heart Bill

In article <z6GdnVjiuIuAKGrfRVn-3w@xxxxxxx>,
"Robert" <Robertitsme@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> "William Wagner" <Nonsence_here_B2wagner@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:Nonsence_here_B2wagner-DE2E46.14274808082005@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > In article
>
> I think you are eating too much of the yellow snow.

I think the yellow snow is better than what our young folks are dealing
with. This my last post on this topic. ( At This time). Hate this
stuff. Words require action. Write your reps and speak from your
heart.

Bill


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/movies/09wint.html?hp

Film Echoes the Present in Atrocities of the Past

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
Published: August 9, 2005

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 8 - Like a live hand grenade brought home from a
distant battlefield, the 34-year-old antiwar documentary "Winter
Soldier" has been handled for decades as if it could explode at any
moment.
Now, the 95-minute film - which has circulated like 16-millimeter
samizdat on college campuses for decades but has never been accessible
to a wide audience - is about to get its first significant theatrical
release in the United States, beginning on Friday at the Film Society of
Lincoln Center. (Other bookings, including Chicago, Detroit, Hartford
and Minneapolis, can be found at www.wintersoldierfilm.com.)
Its distributors say that the war in Iraq has made the Vietnam-era film
as powerful as when it was new, and its filmmakers are calling it eerily
prescient of national embarrassments like the torture at Abu Ghraib.

Seldom has a film seen by so few caused so much consternation for so
many years.
When it was made at a three-day gathering in 1971 of Vietnam veterans
telling of the atrocities they had seen and committed, major news
organizations sent reporters but published and broadcast next to nothing
of what they filed - prompting the veterans to organize what would be a
pivotal antiwar demonstration in Washington a few months later.
When the film was finished a year later, it was shown at the Cannes and
Berlin film festivals, at theaters in France and England, and on German
television. But in the United States, the television networks would not
touch it, the film never found a distributor, and it disappeared for
decades after playing a week at a single New York theater and a one-time
airing on Channel 13.
When one of the veterans - John Kerry, who was seen on screen for less
than a minute - ran for president last year, the old film turned up as
propaganda on both sides of the partisan divide: Mr. Kerry's friend, the
filmmaker George Butler, used footage from "Winter Soldier" to lionize
him in a biographical film underwritten by Democrats called "Going
Upriver." His political enemies on the right, meanwhile, created a Web
site called Wintersoldier.com and made a film of their own, "Stolen
Honor," to assail him as a traitor and a fraud.
"The context is why we wanted to do it," said Amy Heller, co-owner with
her husband, Dennis Doros, of Milestone Films, perhaps best known for
re-releasing Marcel Ophuls's 1971 masterpiece on the Nazi occupation of
France, "The Sorrow and the Pity."
"We have a 9-year-old son," Ms. Heller said, "but if he were 19 and
wondering what he should do with the next stage of his life, I sure
would want him to see this film before considering going into the
military."
The relevance of this grainy, ancient documentary comes from
descriptions of abuse that could have been ripped from contemporary
headlines, notwithstanding the changes in today's professional soldiers
and their evolved, high-tech methods of warfare.
Listen, for instance, to the former Army interrogator as he describes
using "clubs, rifle butts, pistols, knives" to extract information -
"always monitored" by superiors or military police, he says - and
recounts his superiors' overriding directive: "Don't get caught."
Or hear the former Marine captain, speaking of "standard operating
prtocedure," describe how easily individual transgressions, overlooked
by superiors, became de facto policy: "The general attitude of the
officers was - I was a lieutenant at the time - 'Well, there's somebody
senior to me here, and I guess if this wasn't S.O.P., he'd be doing
something to stop it.' And since nobody senior ever did anything to stop
it, the policy was promulgated, and everybody assumed that this was
right."
Mr. Doros said he hoped the film would be shown on cable television,
where anyone could see it, particularly today's troops and tomorrow's.
"They should see that war isn't always what they imagine from movies and
books and modern media," he said. "That the atrocities, the gore, the
daily horror of bombs bursting out and bullets riddling your friends'
bodies next to you, have been glossed over."
What gives "Winter Soldier" its power, he and Ms. Heller said, is not
merely what is said on screen - accounts of Vietnamese women being raped
or mutilated, children being shot, villages being burned, prisoners
being thrown alive from helicopters - but who is saying it, and how they
are shown.
It introduces us to Rusty Sachs, a handsome, curly-haired former Marine
helicopter pilot, who recalls with an ironic smirk how his superiors
instructed him not to "count prisoners when you're loading them on the
aircraft - count them when you're unloading them," because, he says
flatly, "the numbers may not jibe." He describes contests to see "how
far they could throw the bound bodies out of the airplane."
And it introduces us to the gentle-sounding, Jesus-like Scott Camil, a
former Marine scout and forward artillery observer, who in a whispery
voice relates his personal journey from rah-rah patriot to trained
killer to medal-winner to self-preservationist Angel of Death. "If I had
to go into a village and kill 150 people just to make sure there was no
one there to kill me when we walked out, that's what I did," he says.
Like other veterans, Mr. Camil - whose testimony at the Winter Soldier
Investigation inspired Graham Nash's song "Oh, Camil!" - conveys how
desensitized they became, and how dehumanized the Vietnamese became in
their eyes. "Whoever had the most ears, they would get the most beers,"
he says of his comrades' corporeal trophies. "It became like a game."

This was being filmed, it should be emphasized, before the advent of rap
groups and the confessional culture, before people routinely unburdened
themselves on television or an Oprah granted absolution every afternoon.
And it was happening at a stage in the war when the invasion of Laos was
still a secret, when Agent Orange was unheard of, and when the public
was still struggling to make sense of My Lai.
Yet the decidedly low-tech film does nothing to explicate what it
records. It has no narration, except for an opening quotation from
Thomas Paine, whence its title: "These are the times that try men's
souls. The summertime soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this
crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it
now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."
Nor is there any clue given to who made this film. And yet it was the
product of an extraordinary collective of 18 unknown but up-and-coming
documentarians, several of whom would have distinguished film careers:
Barbara Kopple, who went on to direct the Oscar-winning documentaries
"Harlan County, U.S.A." and "American Dream"; Nancy Baker, editor of the
Oscar-winner "Born Into Brothels" and of "Vanya on 42nd Street"; Lucy
Massie Phenix, editor of the Oscar-nominated "Regret to Inform," about
widows of the Vietnam War; Bob Fiore, co-director of "Pumping Iron"; and
David Grubin, for many years the directing partner of Bill Moyers.
Working with borrowed equipment and donated stock - much of it "short
ends" left over from low-budget pornographic films - the group shot more
than 100 hours over a three-day weekend, then spent six months editing
it into what remains a raw and unadorned artifact, allowing the camera
to gaze patiently as each witness tells his story.
But the group effort, Mr. Fiore said, meant no one could claim to be its
auteur. "So it didn't have anybody pushing it, the way Michael Moore
goes around," he said. "At the time, it seemed really important, it was
a political statement. I wanted the film to be for and about the vets.
But as a filmmaking and distributing ploy, it was a failure."
Though "Winter Soldier" was invited to Cannes and shown at several other
film festivals, the group's efforts to have it shown on American
television went nowhere. "We did a screening at NBC," said Fred Aronow,
one of the filmmakers. "We got the reply back that this was incredibly
interesting material that the American public should see, and it's
unfortunate that NBC cannot broadcast it. They did not give a reason."
The film languished largely unseen, except for private and classroom
viewings, until a retrospective at Berlin early last year. When Mr.
Butler paid for rights to use footage from it, Mr. Fiore said, the
filmmakers hoped that his lawyers would prevent anyone from using it to
assassinate Mr. Kerry's character. But the producers of "Stolen Honor,"
an attack on Mr. Kerry that was shown on Sinclair Broadcasting stations
last fall, did use excerpts from "Winter Soldier," and a veteran who
testified, Kenneth J. Campbell, is suing them for defamation.
As polarizing as the film has proven to be, the filmmakers say they hope
that a year removed from the context of a campaign, "Winter Soldier"
will be seen the way it was originally intended.
First, of course, they are hoping it will get an audience, at all.
"It's not any fun to see," Ms. Phenix conceded, in an understatement.
"But the whole society needs to hear about that part of us, because
that's part of us, too. The whole society includes these people who are
having to kill and be killed, and maim and be maimed."

--
Garden Shade Zone 5 in a Japanese Jungle manner.
Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets. To plant a pine, one need only own a shovel.
-- Aldo Leopold
This article is posted under fair use rules in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, and is strictly for the educational and informative purposes.
This material is distributed without profit.
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