Customer Reviews

Regret to Inform [VHS]

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Some have called this documentary "propaganda," and I can understand that point of view since there is no mention of Viet Cong atrocities here; but since this was made some thirty years after the war was over, it can hardly be propaganda. It does present a limited point of view, that of the women who suffered because of the war, but that was film maker Barbara Sonneborn's intention. She wanted to show how she personally suffered because she lost her husband in the war and how she has come to grips with that loss, but more than that she wanted to show how other women also suffered and what the war meant to them, including, and perhaps especially, the Vietnamese women. After all, it was their homes that were bombed, not ours.

Imbedded within and at the heart of Sonneborn's reflections is the story of Xuan Ngoc Nguyen, the Vietnamese-American woman who served as her translator. Nguyen tells her personal story beginning with the sight of the bombs falling on her village and that of her five-year-old cousin being shot by an America soldier (who became horrified at what he had done). She tells of her stint as a prostitute for G.I.'s, her marriage to an American soldier and her coming to America, the end of her marriage, and the implications of her life afterwards, raising her son and becoming Americanized, and finally her return with Sonneborn to the country of her birth. She is the heroine of this film, a woman who faced the horrors of war, did what she felt she had to do, somehow survived in one piece, and now looks back with tears in her eyes.

Sonneborn's documentary owes part of its effectiveness to the contrast between the black and white and fading colored film shot during the war and the brilliant rush of greenery so beautifully photographed today. The effect of seeing the verdant fields of today's Vietnam contrasted with a land torn apart by bombs and sickened with Agent Orange is to show that despite all the damage and death of the war, the fields and those who tend the fields, recover. In this sense--and John Hersey used the same idea in his book, Hiroshima (1946), when he described how the grass grew back after the atom bomb--the futility of war is demonstrated. We kill one another with a ferocious abandonment; nonetheless, the greenery returns, even if, as Carl Sandburg implies in his poem, "Grass," it is fertilized by our blood.

Consequently this film cannot but play as an indictment of the war in Vietnam, and for some, as an indictment of all wars. I will not argue with that. As anyone who has really thought long and hard about war knows, from Sun Tzu to General Powell, it is always best to avoid the war if that is possible, but there comes a time and a circumstance in which one has no choice. The jury has long since rendered its verdict on the war in Vietnam. We are reminded of that every time we hear a commentator say, "We don't want another Vietnam." But there is an enormous difference between the horrendous stupidity of our involvement in Vietnam and the absolute necessity of defending ourselves against the aggression of the fascists and imperialists during World War II. And the war being fought today against terrorism is also one that cannot be avoided.

I see Sonneborn's film as a reminder not only of the horror of war, but of our responsibility to be sure that our cause, as Bush has it, "is just" and our methods restricted to the task at hand, and that the suffering of those involved be ended as soon as humanly possible.

As a longtime but wary viewer of Vietnam War flicks, I've learned that to be moved by a piece of work is not necessarily the same as to be illuminated by it. This is true of the documentary "Regret to Inform," about Vietnam War widows, by Barbara Sonneborn.

While I was moved to tears by parts of the film, I found little that jibed with my own Vietnamese memory: that of a country deeply divided by a civil war, where North and South were at each other's throats long before the Americans arrived. My eldest uncle joined Ho Chi Minh's army in the North while his two brothers joined the South, later becoming pilots who dropped B-52 bombs on him and his troops. It is a memory of Vietnamese killing Vietnamese in a bloody and senseless theater where Americans were mere side actors.

That America plays the central role in Sonneborn's documentary is no surprise. After all, Vietnam was a complicated, three-sided war, a difficult narrative that often gets reduced to two sides - America vs. all Vietnamese.

From that perspective, we see Americans as perpetrators of violence and Vietnamese as innocents in conical hats, waiting to be murdered. We are told this not so much in words but in the footage of American planes dropping bombs and napalm onto the tropical landscape. We are shown Vietnamese being herded and tied up like oxen by GIs or beaten by the butts of M-16s.

Not once do we see a Vietnamese holding a gun. Not once do we see a Vietnamese in army uniform. Only Americans have that privilege, as GIs, as wielders of history.

Vietnamese, so the images suggest, were passive victims of their fate - which does not explain America's defeat.

What I want to tell Sonneborn and all American filmmakers is this: Vietnam is not 14 years old. Vietnam's story does not begin when the first American helicopter landed in the rice fields, and it does not end when the last helicopter left the rooftop of the American Embassy in Saigon. In the 20th century alone, Vietnamese fought, besides their countrymen, the French, the Japanese and the Chinese, and then went on to occupy Cambodia for 10 years. They never lost a war - not counting South Vietnam's defeat.

"What is the legacy of war?" Sonneborn asks in her film, "and what happens after the troops go home?"

What happened is that Hanoi - America's victim-turned-victor - immediately enforced a vindictive policy in the defeated South, putting nearly a million men in "re-education" camps and forcing hundreds of thousands of families to survive in malaria-infested New Economic Zones while confiscating their properties. More than 2 million Vietnamese risked death at sea as boat people to escape.

Where, I wonder, are the voices of the widows whose husbands starved to death in re-education camps? Where are the voices of those who ended up in refugee camps waiting to be accepted by the West?

Why, I wonder, is it easier for filmmakers to fly thousands of miles across the ocean to Hanoi to interview communist officials and film scenes of exotic limestone mountains or sparkling rivers than it is to drive a few miles to San Jose or Los Angeles or Dallas to interview the million or so Vietnamese-Americans? Is it because their epic story might somehow dislodge Americans' own narcissistic sense of guilt?

If that is the case, the answer to Sonneborn's question regarding the legacy of war is this: War and its aftermath are always bad, but it is worse when its history is simplified and its many voices muffled. The result of such misinformation is always ignorance.

Nominated for an Oscar in 1999 and winner of best documentary and best cinematography at Sundance, this little film is tremendously intense. Twenty years after her husband was killed in Vietnam, filmmaker Barbara Sonneborn interviewed more than 200 American and Vietnamese women widowed by the war. She traveled to Vietnam to interview the Vietnamese widows and the scenes in Vietnam are haunting with their magnificent cinematography and graphic stories as told by the women. In between the interviews, and sometimes in the background, she uses rare archival footage to reinforce the individual stories.

The American women are living with the memories long after their husbands' deaths, wondering about what happened over there. There's a woman who wishes she had the nerve to smash her husband's hand to keep him from going, a woman whose husband wasn't killed in Vietnam, but came home sick with multiple cancers from Agent Orange, a Native American woman whose husband, a former rodeo rider, felt a racial connection to the Vietnamese people. Most of all though, it was the Vietnamese women whose stories were the most moving. After all, the war took place on their land. They also lost children and parents and had their homes burned down. Some of them were tortured and all of them have memories of murder and destruction. It is all so very very sad.

Yes, this is an anti-war film, produced many years after the Vietnam war, at a time when people would rather forget. But for those whose lives were forever altered, there is no forgetting. This film remembers.

This is an original and extraordinary documentary that delivers meaningful, real life stories about war. I found each story to be honest and genuine expressions of the impact that war has had on the survivors. The primary focus of the film is based on testimony from a number of individuals whose lives were altered as a result the conflict. The individual stories are purposely told with an emphasis on the suffering, not the cause or blame or an allegiance to a cause.

An Oscar nominee, Sundance 99 winner, and Golden Spire winner. On January 1, 1968, Barbara Sonneborn's husband, Jeff Gurvitz, left to fight in the Vietnam War. Eight weeks later, on February 29, 1968, he crawled out of a foxhole during a mortar attack to rescue his radio operator and was killed. Sonneborn learned of her husband's death on her 24th birthday. "We regret to inform you..." read the official notice. When his personal effects were returned three months later, his dog tags and wedding ring were encrusted with his own blood. The shock and grief eased with the years, but not the anger. On January 1, 1988, twenty years after Jeff's death, Sonneborn woke up suddenly determined to do something about his death in the Vietnam War. She began to write Jeff a heart wrenching letter to tell him the impact that his death had on her life. She recalls the night before he left, writing, "You were so alive, so filled, filled with life... How could you not come back?" This on-going letter is the narrative thread of Regret to Inform. In all those years Sonneborn had met only one other Vietnam War widow. She knew that she wanted to find other widows on both sides of the conflict, to understand how their husbands' deaths had shaped their lives. What could be learned from these women's stories about war, loss, survival and healing after all these years? Sonneborn knew she had to go to Vietnam to find the place where her husband was killed, and to talk to other widows. Her documentary film Regret to Inform is both her response to her experience and the agent of her catharsis. Sonneborn interviewed over 200 widowed women by phone and in short pre-production interviews, and another 43 in person, 25 of these in Vietnam. Widows include Norma Banks, April Burns, Le Thi Ngot, Charlotte Begay, Nguyen Thi Hong, Diane Can Renselaar, Tran Nghia, Lula Bia, Grace Castillo, Phan Thi Thuan, Phan Ngoc Dung, Truong Thi Le, Thurong Thi Le, Truong Thi Huoc, Nguyen My Hein, and Nguyen Ngoc Xuan.

This tale of the incredible heart break on both sides of the Viet Nam war left with with tears streaming down my face. It is an incredible illustration of what war really is, and leaves you questioning who the enemy really is.

If you are looking for a well written film telling about the wonderful actions of our brave American soldiers, this film is not for you. If you want to hear the truth about the horrible tradgedy of war, and its cost on both sides of the line..get this film.

I had been looking for a copy of Regret to Inform for several years now. I finally had a chance to watch the documentary and I was blown away. This is a very painful documentary to watch. It deals with the widows of the Vietnam War and how they dealt with the experience of losing their husbands and also about the years after. Surprisingly, this documentary also features Vietnamese women who lost their husbands in the war (the Vietnamese call it the American War).

I have read many soldiers accounts of the war (Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, Robert Mason, etc) and I have read histories of what happened and why on the political side of the conflict. What I have very little experience with is the homefront, the families of the soldiers. Regret to Inform does not address any political ramifications of the war or the reasons for it. Regret to Inform has everything to do with the women. It is a painful story to watch unfold.

The American widows have had to deal with their men going to a foreign country and to kill people who did nothing to them. One Native American woman recalls how her husband saw how similar he looked to the Vietnamese and how incomprehensible it was that he would be called to kill these men. Another woman tells of her husband who came home, but was already dead. He held on for years, but suffered the affects of Agent Orange. For him, going home from Vietnam was only the beginning of the war.

The Vietnamese widows have a similar, but somewhat different story to tell. While they deal with the same grief from the loss of their husbands, they also had to deal with the fact that the war was on their lands, in their homes. They say American soldiers walking through their villages, killing their children. This is the story that they are telling, of the horror of being in the war, but not fighting it. Their homes were bombed as they try to feed their families. They have both physical and emotional suffering and it is difficult to comprehend the nature of their suffering.

This is a powerful and painful film. Because of the very nature of the subject, this is an anti-war film. It was nominated for an Academy Award. This is an excellent film.

I'm a university lecturer and have taught classes focusing on the Vietnam War. I'm also the sister of a Vietnam Vet who died of Agent Orange poisoning. REGRET TO INFORM is one of the best documentaries to be done about that historic period. I've used this documentary in my college classes, and it has brought many students to tears. It has also affected the soldiers in my classes profoundly. This semester, a young man who just finished his training in the Airforce, said he has been forever changed by the images in this movie and that he understands for the first time what effect war has on civilians. I believe that in looking at Sonneborn's film, we ALL have to take into account what her purpose was. I don't find this documentary to be one-sided because Sonneborn achieves what she sets out to do: to connect with other wives and allow them to talk about their pain, hoping to assuage her own pain in the process. She does look at the losses from both sides.

Indeed, in her film, war itself is the atrocity. Of course more attention is going to be paid to the consequences of "The American War" for the Vietnamese: the war was in their country. Many of them experienced total devastation and wrecked lives, whole families slaughtered. In one heart-wrenching moment, for instance, a Vietnamese woman shares that nearly her entire family was killed before they had a chance to eat breakfast. She weeps for them, even to this day.

The gift of this movie is that it shows the extent to which these women have reconciled their lives with the pain of war, and it shows the power of forgiveness. At one point, Sonneborn encounters the people who may very well have been responsible for the death of her husband, yet she treats them with dignity and respect, participates in a solemn ceremony with them for all that has been lost. Moreover, Sonneborn HAS to focus on the brutality of American troops because her own husband acknowledged it and tried to make humanistic choices in the face of all the confusion that was Vietnam. The other American women in this film have to face up to the fact that their husbands might have committed brutal acts.

One of the reasons this acknowledgment of American brutality is so important is that young people today don't understand that Americans are capable of it: they think we're more moral than others. To illustrate: one of my students thought the Vietnamese had invented and sprayed Agent Orange!

Until Americans face the fact that we are no better nor any worse than any other human being, we will be victims of our own hypocrisy and fail to grow as individuals and as a nation.

This unique documentary clearly portrays some of the tragic effects of war on wives of soldiers from both sides of the Vietnam War. Unfortunately the director (whose husband was killed in action in that war) blames the US and the South Vietnamese governments for those tragedies and fails to mention the dreadful atrocities inflicted by the Vietnamese Communist guerillas on many innocent South Vietnamese and indigenous tribal men, women, children. Despite this distorted retrospective look, the film is well made and worth seeing. The film's most redeeming premise is that war indelibly alters the lives of all who suffer the trauma and loss that occurs during wartime.

This is the first documentary I have seen that deals with war (the Vietnam War) from the perspective of the women. The filmmaker (widowed herself by the Vietnam War) goes back to where her husband was killed 20 years ago and interviews other widows from both sides. This film shows the true human cost of war and brings up compelling questions. A must see!