Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
"Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry" begins and ends as a fulsome Kerry campaign bio along the lines of the famed Bill Clinton convention short, "The Man From Hope." We see old home movies of the Man from St. Paul's and hear about his youthful leadership qualities -- "His derring-do was inherent as a kid," and so forth -- and for documentary purposes, it's all rather irrelevant. The time has come for showing, not saying.
Luckily, the vast midsection of George Butler's solid, often revelatory adaptation of Douglas Brinkley's book, "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War," shows rather than tells. And what it shows is not just the Vietnam War experiences of John Forbes Kerry but the experiences of the men who were with him and of the generation from which the candidate's story cannot be extracted.
What has gone missing in the partisan war of words over Kerry's military record is historical context. "Going Upriver" provides it.
It's a context of youthful idealism betrayed, and of a harder antiwar idealism rising from the ashes. Kerry is the one person not interviewed for the film; instead the reminiscences come from fellow vets, some well-known, like former Senator Max Cleland, a Georgia Democrat, others rank-and-file, like Navy gunner (and current Rev.) David Alston and gunner's mate Fred Short.
What these men make quite clear is that day-to-day life on a swift boat was living hell. Originally deployed for Coast Guard-style duty in open waters, the boats were sent upriver as targets -- there's no other word -- to lure the Viet Cong out of hiding. Some boats got into as many as five firefights a day; for some, the casualty rate was 90 percent. This is the chaotic framework into which "Going Upriver" sets the details of how Kerry got his medals. And what emerges isn't the current candidate's heroism but that of everybody on the boats.
At the same time, the film makes the case that Vietnam was an ideological debacle in which the death of innocent civilians was both an inevitable byproduct of confused military motives and official US policy. (Of the Mekong Delta "free-fire zone," a veteran and Yale classmate of Kerry's says simply: "If you saw someone, you could kill him.")
The second half of the film deals with the soldiers' return home and the transformation of many of them into committed antiwar activists. Again, this material will be eye-opening to anyone too young to have been there, and will provide a provocative memory jog to those who were. Members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War such as ex-Marines Bobby Miller and Rusty Sachs recall the Winter Soldier Investigation in January 1971, in which over 100 veterans described witnessing or taking part in atrocities. We see Sachs, Miller, Kerry, and others in their youth at the April 1971 gathering of VVAW veterans on the Washington mall, during which mothers of dead soldiers were barred from Arlington National Cemetery and soldiers threw their medals away.
"Going Upriver," in other words, puts you back into the heat and fury of the antiwar protests of three decades ago; for young viewers especially, this is the film's greatest strength. And until the end of this section, Kerry is just another face in the crowd; a privileged, straight-arrow VVAW leader not entirely trusted by the more radical members, but necessary to take the case to Middle America.
The June 1971 "Dick Cavett Show" segment in which Kerry debates John E. O'Neill is a time-capsule treat for the way it captures what made the future Massachusetts senator a media darling. (O'Neill, a Vietnam vet hired by Nixon chief counsel Chuck Colson to counteract the charismatic young activist, is currently the leader of the anti-Kerry Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.) As H.R. Haldeman told Nixon (and we hear on the secret tapes), Kerry "looks like a Kennedy and he talks exactly like a Kennedy," and how ironic that the mannerisms that put him over in 1971 make him suspect as a candidate today.
Regardless of your political persuasions, "Going Upriver" is worth seeing, if only to remind yourself that Vietnam can never be removed from its era. The film's a useful primer, too, on the nature of commitment -- to one's beliefs as they evolve and to one's friends as they survive. The lesson is only partly about John Kerry, despite the director's attempts to wrap things up in a bow at film's end. That said, "Going Upriver" might be even more illuminating paired with a documentary on what George W. Bush was up to at the same time. Any takers?
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