Hearts and Minds is an Academy Award-winning documentary released in 1974 (1hr 52min) that is openly critical of the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. I decided to pick it up from Netflix and watch it again after viewing it once in class.
The film is a collection of interview clips and B-roll film put together in an astoundingly shocking way to tell the story of the real nature of the Vietnam War. Some background from the film itself (and some not): by 1954, the United States had become involved in Indochina (otherwise known as Vietnam) by financing 78% of France’s war against Indochina. As a colony of the French leadership, Vietnam was fighting for its independence against the French and, later, against the United States. The United States then went on to continue the counter-revolution against Vietnam through the Vietnam War, which really started with our subsidizing of the French-Indochina battles. The population of the United States was told that we were fighting against an evil called Communism; Noam Chomsky explains that
“Communists” is a term regularly used in American political theology to refer to people who are commutted to the belief that “the government has direct responsibility for the welfare of the people.” I’m quoting the words of a 1949 State Department intelligence report which warned about the spread of this grim and evil doctrine . . .
— Noam Chomsky, Intervention in Vietnam and Central America: Parallels and Differences (1985); reprinted in The Chomsky Reader, James Peck, ed., 1987; ISBN 0-394-75173-6, page 319
The title of the documentary is from a statement by former President Lyndon Johnson:
“So we must be ready to fight in Vietnam, but the ultimate victory will depend upon the hearts and the minds of the people who actually live out there.”
— Lyndon Johnson
Interestingly, the phrase “hearts and minds” is also being used in the current war on terrorism in much the same manner.
There is a very famous scene in the documentary showing two US soldiers taking advantage of two Vietnamese call girls, twisting their nipples and trying to convince them to cooperate; one soldier is quoted as saying “If my chick at home could see this now, man, she’d flip.”
The very next scene is a soldier lighting a straw roof on fire and escorting the men away, with helicopters firing on huts in rice paddies.
The contrast between these two scenes is stunning: first, we have U.S. soldiers treating Vietnamese women as nothing more then toys, then we have the destruction of Vietnamese homes and lives, also by U.S. soldiers. The implication here is that we regarded life in Vietnam as subhuman. This is backed up by a quote later in the movie from one Lieutenant George Coker, a former Prisoner of War in Vietnam. Coker is speaking to a group of schoolchildren, and is asked what Vietnam looked like. He replies: “What did Vietnam look like. Well, if it wasn’t for the people, it was very pretty. Uh, the people over there are very backward and very primitive. And they just make a mess out of everything.”
Probably the most compelling quote from the entire movie, for me, was from Daniel Ellsberg: “We weren’t on the wrong side. We are the wrong side.” To me, this also epitomizes most U.S. wars (peace actions, interventions, etc.) since Vietnam: the U.S. has consistently been the wrong side. This holds true in Iraq as well. One could very easily make a documentary about our attacks on Iraq and have it look a lot like Hearts and Minds.
The final scene in the movie is a clip from an interview of Randy Floyd, a Vietnam veteran. When asked “Do you think we’ve learned anything from all this?”, referring to the war, he replies:
I think we’re trying not to. I think I’m trying not to sometimes. I can’t even cry easily. From my, uh, my manhood image. I think Americans have tried–we’ve all tried very hard to escape what we’ve learned in Vietnam, to not come to the logical conclusions of what’s happened there. You know, the military does the same thing. They don’t realize that, um.. people fighting for their own freedom are not gonna be stopped by just changing your tactics, adding a little bit more sophisticated technology over here, improving the tactics we used last time, not making quite the same mistakes. Uh, you know, I think history operates a little different than that. And I think that those kind of forces are not gonna be stopped. I think Americans have worked extremely hard not to see the criminality that their officials and their policy makers have exhibited.
Overall, this is one of the most influential documentaries I’ve ever seen. I’d highly recommend it to anyone trying to understand Vietnam or our current actions in Iraq.