Those of a certain age have images of the war in Vietnam stamped permanently in their eyes and brains – the famous photo of the South Vietnamese officer executing a man on the street, another of a terrified naked girl running along a road. Film images of helicopters, soldiers firing blindly from behind fences and walls, and panicked Vietnamese people hanging from the skids of a helicopter as it takes off from a roof in Saigon at the moment the U.S. pulled out.
Now, Last Days in Vietnam, opens up another avenue of thought and vision: what actually happened as the whole bizarre affair wound down, after Richard Nixon's cynical refrain of "peace with honor."
The film is about the days when the U.S. bailed. Thousands of people scrambled to get out – and some of them did act with tremendous care and honor. The documentary is directed by Rory Kennedy, the youngest child of Robert and Ethel Kennedy, who was born six months after her father was assassinated.
Kennedy has assembled Last Days in Vietnam from interviews with about a half-dozen people who were there at the end – American military, a former CIA agent, a Vietnamese refugee, a former Vietnamese naval officer. No women, which seems odd, but certainly people who were right in the thick of things.
Kennedy avoids bogging down in the familiar minefield of politics, judgments about the war, and, of course, long-simmering resentments. The short of it is that when a war is ending and one side has won, the questions about the war become irrelevant to actual events. Rightly or wrongly, thousands of Vietnamese were connected to the United States. They'd been soldiers in the army we supported or politicians in a structure we supported. They'd been employees in the U.S. embassy; they'd been interpreters; they'd been cooks. And all of these people had families.
One of the witnesses in the film said he realized that he had to rescue a tailor who'd made civilian clothes for American soldiers, because the man would be in great danger when the army of North Vietnam entered Saigon.
Of course there's the continuing important conversation about the U.S. as an occupying force and what that did to the country, but Last Days in Vietnam makes you see that those evaluations don't matter in the last days. All of these Vietnamese people were liable to be captured, imprisoned, beaten and in many cases murdered because that's what happens when one side wins a war and takes over.
Last Days in Vietnam sticks to the humanitarian story of the effort to evacuate – how the American ambassador, Graham Martin, didn't comprehend that it was time to enact the evacuation plan, how a number of subordinates against orders, secretly prepared people for evacuating, how eventually Ambassador Martin acted, and how he did so with great force and humanity, and loyalty to the people he owed responsibility.
But best of all in this documentary, Rory Kennedy has real film images of the events. She doesn't identify the sources well during the film – you have to read the tiny end credits, but the footage is striking: shots of people milling around the embassy, of the helicopters starting to land in the embassy yard. Kennedy has super-8 film taken by a sailor as a flock of small helicopters landed on the deck of the U.S.S. Kirk, and the crew then dumped the now-useless helicopters into the sea.
There's a stunning story of a Vietnamese pilot hovering his huge Chinook helicopter above the too-small deck so refugees could toss their babies to waiting sailors and then jump. He then flies off, tilts the helicopter one way, and jumps out the other side into the sea as the copter falls away.
What matters most in the film is a ton of movie footage from the time that is not well-known, making it one to be seen.
