Winter Soldier

For those who care, I'd like to bring to your attention that one of the greatest achievements in documentary filmmaking ever coming out of USA will finally be released on May 30th. I think netflix will carry it as well.

Winter Soldier is a documentary which one experiences, instead of simply viewing. Over three days in January and February 1971, just a couple months before Lieutenant William Calley would be sentenced to life in prison for the My Lai Massacre (he would eventually serve less than four years), a group of Vietnam War veterans convened at a Howard Johnson in Detroit to testify about the atrocities they had witnessed or partaken in while serving in Vietnam. The conference was titled “The Winter Soldier Investigation,” after Thomas Paine: “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.”

Needless to say, the country didn’t stand up and thank the (mostly long-haired and disenchanted) vets for reminding them of the sinkhole of iniquity America had mired itself in overseas. The gut-wrenching, eye-opening stories delivered by hundreds of soldiers in that sterile hotel conference room were mostly ignored by the media, and would likely have sunk without a trace after being published in the Congressional Record. The testimony, however, was shot by a group called the Winterfilm Collective (including the future Academy Award-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple) and edited into a tight, 95-minute piece of scorching truth-telling that played around at some film festivals, colleges, and one small Manhattan cinema, before mostly disappearing from the scene.

WinterSoldierFilm

Winter Soldier 1972