Brothers In Arms

(Docu)

A First Run Features release of the Gordon Motion Picture Co. presentation. Produced by Iris G. Rossi. Executive producers, Paul Alexander, Rossi, William Spear, Nicholas Butterworth. Directed by Paul Alexander.

With: Sen. John F. Kerry, Rev. David Alston, Del Sandusky, Gene Thorson, Mike Medeiros.

By ROBERT KOEHLER

Given the continued partisan uproar -- fueled by the political news-starved media in the August dog days -- over John Kerry's Vietnam experience, "Brothers in Arms" is a respectfully modest effort that allows Kerry and his Swift boat comrades to tell their stories in their own voices. Pic's theatrical release in select U.S. cities must be one of the better-timed of any docu all year, beating "Going Upriver," documaker George Butler's Kerry-in-'Nam film, set for Toronto Film Festival preem. Shelf life will be inexorably tied to Kerry's victory or defeat in November.

Only a brief opening montage of radio and TV clips on the Vietnam War departs from a soundtrack devoted to testimony and memories of the vets, who introduce themselves with brief bios. Kerry's testimony is grouped among his buddies' -- a sure sign that tyro helmer Paul Alexander intended this to be a portrait of men in battle and not just a John Kerry promotional pic.

A fine assembly of mostly color archive footage shot from the Swift boats (essentially identical to the boat that voyages upriver in "Apocalypse Now") accompanies the men's accounts of their missions to search and destroy North Vietnamese jungle outposts during 1969.

Rev. David Alston, the boat's chief gunner, delivers the most palpable and heart-rending recollections -- from his haiku-like description of the Swift boat's wake as "the rooster tail" and his second-by-second account of being hit by bullets, to the loss of his wife to cancer and his journey from alcoholism and suicide to Christianity.

Pilot Del Sandusky and gunner Mike Medeiros provide crucial accounts, vis-a-vis the current debate over Kerry's war record, about how Kerry as boat commander pursued a North Vietnamese gunman by jumping ashore and killing him. They strongly argue that Kerry deserved the Silver Star for his valor, and only briefly allude to widely discredited claims (revived whenever Kerry is running for office) that he shot the gunman in the back.

Another fiery incident involving the boat and her crew is described by Alston, boat engineer Gene Thorson and others in such detail that charges issued by vets in the current anti-Kerry television ad that the candidate is lying seem profoundly misguided in suggesting that the entire boat's crew is lying as well.

Kerry comes off, perhaps unsurprisingly, as the most articulate and cerebral of the bunch, but also direct ("the war taught me how the government can lie to its people"). In a detail often overlooked, his anti-war involvement was supported by some on his crew, but not (at first) by Medeiros, who says that he was still a "hawk" at the time. His mates' bouts with alcohol, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide are war stories in themselves, though Kerry (who did have post-trauma episodes) isn't included in these testimonies.

Camera (color/B&W, DV, 16mm), Elisabeth Haviland James; editor, James ; music, Michael Bacon; sound, Paul Furedi; archival research, Bonnie Rowan, Lisa A. Kim. Reviewed on videotape, Los Angeles, Aug. 24, 2004. Running time: 67 MIN.

Addenda: More from The American Prospect:

Unlike most of the documentaries this fraught electoral season, Brothers in Armsis blessedly a story rather than a polemical harangue -- it has swing, a narrative arc, unforgettable characters. The director opens his film with an elegant sort of overture, weaving together stock footage of Vietnam battles with the unseen crewmens’ voices, edited together in a seamless story line: their lives before Vietnam, the terror of war, the alienating aftermath, the bond forged between men who fought side by side. The very texture of their voices serve as both soundtrack and character development -- gritty, gravelly, one with a nicotine-tinged laugh, another with a nasal twang, all with an inner cadence that reveals vital information about each man. “Crick,” says Del Sandusky, giving away his rural origins as he reminisces about the local creek.

Gene Thorson, David Alston, Tommy Belodeau (who passed away last year), Michael Medeiros, Sandusky, and Kerry represented a broad swath of America, hailing from the Midwest, the South, and the Northeast and from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. The soldiers joined the Navy for a similarly varied set of reasons: to seek opportunities for higher education, to see the world, to fulfill a sense of patriotic duty, to shoulder responsibility. Their experiences in Vietnam, however, welded the men together irrevocably. As one of the crewmembers says in voice-over, “We went through this together … that guy covered my back, and I love him for that.”

The film captures the whiplash arrhythmia of war, moments of calm and exuberance followed by plunges into terror, as when Lieutenant Kerry, accompanied by Medeiros, pursued a Viet Cong intent on firing a rocket at the boat and killed him. Kerry’s actions that day later earned him a Silver Star. Alston depicts a savage firefight in his unmistakable South Carolina drawl, laughing a bit as he recounts asking a fellow crewmember, “Is my eye there? Is it there?” Sandusky is haunted by a simple decision that saved his life and took a comrade’s. “That’s called survivor’s guilt,” he says. The crewmates’ tortured faces remind us that they aren’t just recounting past memories; the telling of the past is also forcing them to relive the anguish of wartime and a difficult homecoming.

Less than half the movie is devoted to the crewmen’s battlefield experiences. Using the song “Amazing Grace” as a lyrical bridge, Alexander lays out his subjects’ exit from Vietnam as gracefully as he depicts their arrival: their nightmarish return to a country that called them “baby killers,” their attendant struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder and alcoholism, and growing doubts -- particularly for Kerry, who became an outspoken anti-war activist -- over whether the war they had been sent to fight was indeed a just one.

Although they didn’t see one another for years after their return, the crewmates rekindled their bond when they reunited to defend Kerry from attacks on his Vietnam record during his 1996 senatorial re-election campaign. As for this year, recent SBVT charges will almost certainly mean a busy fall for the men. Brothers in Arms doesn’t include the testimony of Kerry’s detractors; its pre-SBVT-mandated story is at once a deceptively straightforward tale of wartime horrors and friendships and an endorsement of Kerry as a hero, on and off the battlefield. It doesn’t attempt to get at the whole truth of Kerry’s Vietnam experiences, but adds its own subtle brand of fire to the fight over Kerry’s record. The timing of the film’s release is at once opportune and ironic: In the midst of war in Iraq and on the election front, this film about brotherhood shows us just how far we are from that ideal.