Hearts and Minds (on DVD)

With the war in Iraq raging on, it is even more poignant to watch the 1974 documentary, Hearts and Minds (winner of the 1975 best documentary Oscar). Director Peter Davis uses footages of the Vietnam War, interviews with policy makers, soldiers and their family members, Vietnamese, and Presidential speeches to show us conflicting views from all sides. Davis cleverly interweaves interviews and speeches with war footage, clearly exposing how reality differs from one’s intentions and even worse, how politicians may have lied to the American people and more alarmingly, how easily people could be fooled. The movie was made before the Fall of Saigon, but watching it, one can see the end is coming. It is ironic to see how western war propaganda movies are so similar to their counterparts in communist countries such as China. During the Red Scare era, American youths were basically fed the same kind of completely biased opinions about communism as the youths in communist countries were taught about capitalism. Americans’ extreme fear about communism led them into the Vietnam War, but they are really not that different from their enemies. They are fundamentally the same people – loyal to their causes and patriotic to their countries, except they have completely different political beliefs. The two iconic images always associated with the Vietnam War are both in this movie, but instead of being shown in the stillness of photographs, they are presented in real motions and equally haunting. The saddest part about this movie and other war documentaries like 2003’s Academy Award winner The Fog of War is that those war veterans all correctly predicted people would not learn their lessons from wars and there would always be more wars for future generations. When the pilots in Hearts and Minds talk about the technological advances in fighter jets from WWII to Vietnam War, it is downright depressing to know that humans have improved their killing skills and we can now simply kill more people at faster rates. Is Earth going to become what Ray Bradbury painted in his futuristic novels – a barren planet with mankind annihilated by all the super powerful weapons constantly being invented to destroy ourselves? “All we ask is to give peace a chance”, but unfortunately that seems to be always last on world leaders’ foreign policy agendas.