# Return with Honor (1998)

### reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten

    RETURN WITH HONOR

Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Ocean Releasing Director: Freida Lee Mock, Terry Sanders Writer: Freida Lee Mock, Terry Sanders, Christine Z. Wiser Cast: Everett Alvarez, Jim Stockdale, Jeremiah Denton, Robbie Risner, John McCain, Richard Stratton, John McGrath, Douglas Hegdahl, Ron Bliss, others

Presidents Kennedy and Johnson thought that if the U.S. did nothing to stop North Vietnam from annexing South Vietnam--as the former regime threatened to do in a civil war between those two separated regions--the countries surrounding Vietnam would fall to Communism one by one. Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and eventually Japan would succumb to pressure from their neighbors and install pro-Communist regimes hostile to the West. We know now that they were wrong. Things just didn't turn out that way. The U.S. lost the first war in its history when the last of 450,000 American troops pulled out in 1973, Vietnam turned Red, and for the past 26 years Thailand and Japan remained solidly in the pro-Western camp.

But back in the sixties, only a handful of intellectuals and journalists warned against an action that most thought would be over in a matter of weeks. Gung-ho Americans, longing to reverse the Communist spread and see a little action, looked forward with enthusiasm to the U.S. involvement. Not the least of the ardent troops were airmen educated in the famous school for U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado, who proceeded with the blessings of Kennedy and Johnson and later of President Nixon to bomb the blazes out of the hostile people taking their orders from Hanoi. Inevitably, a large number of aircraft were shot down, the men choosing when they could to bail out, hoping to use their training to flee to safety in the jungle. Things didn't work out quite that way for twenty particular men who are the subjects of a stunning documentary financed largely by Tom Hanks called "Return With Honor." The movie, directed by Freida Lee Mock and Terry Sanders (who had previously made "Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision"), is not of the razzle-dazzle sort that might bring a large nationwide audience to the multiplexes. Nonetheless, seeing "Return With Honor" is a moving experience, a movie inhabited only partly with the bane of documentaries--the talking heads--but populated as well with dramatic film clips taken from the war archives. Some celluloid has been supplied by the North Vietnamese, surprisingly enough, clips that put them in a bad light as people who ignored the Geneva Convention and resorted to torture and unconscionable manipulations to get the prisoners to give information and to "confess to war crimes" on TV. They did not consider the American action against them to be a war; hence, the prisoners were appraised as common criminals to be treated with all the means prohibited by international rules. By 1969 462 pilots were shot down and treated by their captors with bestial strategies. The subjects of this film were kept in the so-called Hanoi Hilton, a dungeon ironically built by the French to house Vietnamese while France was fighting in its former colony. The men were paraded in the streets to be stoned and spat upon by the residents, and, far worse, they were subjected to the rope torture. This involved tying their arms and hand tightly and twisting a rope until their elbows and shoulders were dislocated--ostensibly to get information which these soldiers could not possibly have about future targets.

Thinking that perhaps they could withstand the Asian hellhole for two years, they were overwhelmed by confinement for seven. Despite all, the twenty subjects of this picture had kept their spirits up and miraculously survived the occasional solitary confinement and poor diet to be reunited with their families after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords.

Although many returning veterans were emotionally disabled by their battlefield experiences, these men came out apparently without a trace of so-called shellshock and relate stories of unusually skillful techniques which they mastered in prison. Douglas Hegdahl, for example, was able to rattle off the names of all 268 POWs when he returned home, having memorized the names without even the benefit of pencil and paper. John McGrath found out that he was an artist when he broke the boils on his skin and used the pus to paint on the bleak stone walls of his 7x7 cell. Richard Stratton, who agreed to confess, foiled his captors on TV by pretending to be a robotized Manchurian Candidate while Jeremiah Denton, similarly put in front of a camera, checkmated his captors by blinking the word "torture" in Morse Code with his eyes. The men agreed that if they could not communicate with one another in their separate cells, they would go stark raving mad. They figured out a way to do this by tapping out a code of their own invention, putting the letters of the alphabet in five rows of five letters each and, for example, hitting the walls with tap tap (pause) tap tap tap, to mean row two letter three (which is H).

This extraordinary documentary was trashed in a mean- spirited Village Voice review by Michael Atkinson, who-- apparently furious that the antiwar protests were not given more than a few seconds of time--trashed everything from the camera's "drunken pans through jungles" to the lack of black and Hispanic prisoners, even taking the opportunity to jab at Steven Spielberg and Roberto Benigni for "dulcifying the Holocaust." Ignore the knee-jerk leftist reaction. "Return With Honor," which opened commercially in only one New York theater and seemingly not at all in L.A., is unabashedly patriotic--giving Americans a long-overdue message that the people who fought on the American side in the Vietnam was are indeed heroes.

    Not Rated.  Running Time: 102 minutes.  (C) 1999
    Harvey Karten

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