The free and the brave

REVIEW

Return With Honor

Directed by Freida Lee Mock and Terry Sanders

Rated ?

Opens June 16

Cynical types may look at the documentary about American POWs in Vietnam, Return With Honor, as a feature-length advertisement for the United States Air Force. A film project, instigated by three 1965 alumni of the U.S. Air Force Academy and funded in part by Boeing-McDonnell, Return With Honor never ventures far from its military origins.

The film records the experiences of the hundreds of pilots who were shot down over North Vietnam during the course of that deeply unpopular, divisive war and spent, in some cases, up to eight-and-a-half years as prisoners of war. A host of former soldiers still wearing the cropped hair and immaculate grooming of career servicemen, including Sen. John McCain, are interviewed. Most describe a common experience of cocksure flyboy elation followed by a devastating crash as the invincibility of the pilots’ detached station of airborne superiority crumbled after their literal and psychological grounding in Vietnam. The pilots describe in harrowing detail the devastation of years of torture and separation from families, a separation so painful, in fact, that many would not allow their minds to even wander to wives and children.

The stories recounted by the soldiers in Return With Honor are often thrillingly hard-core - the stuff of adventure story and John Wayne legend - like the POW who drew a stag on his cell wall using his own blood, or the unwavering resolve of all of the prisoners to reject early release from their prisons unless all prisoners were freed.

Return With Honor is a traditional, by-the-book documentary made by a pair of über-conventional directors, Freida Lee Mock and Terry Sanders, who crank out biographies and Academy Award-nominated product. But in Return With Honor, such directorial innocuousness can’t swamp the gripping personal accounts by these soldiers of what they endured in captivity. Though their survival is testament to their strength, many of the soldiers recount still-raw feelings of shame and despair over breaking down under torture. Return With Honor is a reminder that one of the most devastating sights in a cinema awash with untold tragedies, heartbreak, longing and suffering is still that of a grown man crying.

Because of its military sponsorship, the film’s emphasis is on the concept of returning to the United States without having compromised your country or yourself - the “return with honor” of the film’s title. With the same single-minded determination with which the onscreen former POWs visualize their survival, the makers of Return With Honor keep their gaze unwavering upon the success stories, never pausing to consider the disenchanted vet or the captive who has become a psychological casualty of this trial by fire. It is that dogmatic bottom-line, which is emphasized in scenes of new recruits training at the Air Force Academy and in the testimony of the pilots themselves, that reiterates the righteousness and necessity of discipline and training in making these men able to withstand years of torture and imprisonment.

So, while the underlying political agenda of the film - to reaffirm the methods of our military machine - is fairly obvious, Return With Honor remains a watchable, enticing film for the human element, which puts such grand ideas to the test. The men seem like a lost breed - the last of the broad-shouldered patriot: real people whose experiences of shame, dishonor, spiritual crisis and emotional breakdown challenge the gung-ho stereotype that constitutes our cinematic, propagandistic vision of the military.

It is almost impossible to imagine men in today’s fractured, divisive and analytical America bolstered over an eight-year prison stint by the patriotism and love of their country these men confess with the innocence and trust of another age.

There is something tragic, not only in the years these men lost and the pain they endured, but also in the notion of a generation of men and women who could trust so fundamentally and passionately in the concept of nationhood, they could use that belief to buoy themselves through their darkest hours. It is almost impossible to imagine, post-Vietnam, the sense of solidarity and common purpose that allowed these men to remain faithful to their country. The real lesson of Return With Honor may be that America as a concept worth fighting and dying for may have passed with this last wave of men. ??