TV REVIEW : Realism Ranks High in ‘Letters Home’

Perspectives on Vietnam have flooded our screens lately. But “Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam,” on Home Box Office Sunday at 9 p.m., is surely the most authentic of all the recent Vietnam films.

The reason: Its words, as well as its images, were created in Vietnam as the war raged. The writers were the soldiers and nurses themselves, expressing their thoughts and feelings in letters home to loved ones.

The letters were collected for a book, edited by Bernard Edelman for the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission. In the movie, they’re read by a glittering cast: Robert De Niro, Michael J. Fox, Sean Penn, Robin Williams, Kathleen Turner, Ellen Burstyn, Brian Dennehy, Howard Rollins Jr., Randy Quaid, “Platoon” stars Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe and many more.

But we don’t see any of these famous faces. This is a movie about the American soldiers, not their fictional stand-ins.

Drawing on NBC and Defense Department archives as well as home movies and stills shot by GIs themselves, director Bill Couturie has found Vietnam footage to match the impact of these marvelous letters.

And he has synchronized the words and the pictures with a hard-driving sound track, primarily of rock standards from the Vietnam era, that evokes the times with a startling immediacy.

Examples abound. In one scene, as we hear from a letter in which a soldier describes his platoon comrades as “a bunch of screwballs,” we see home movie footage of a bunch of soldiers cavorting like, yes, screwballs, in a break from the tension of the war. Their movements look as if they might have been choreographed to fit “Walk Like a Man,” sung by the Four Seasons in the background. But then, while the song keeps playing, the picture changes to one of the soldiers on patrol, walking like the wary, weary men they were.

The bulk of the film is arranged chronologically, broken up into segments devoted to one year each. At first, soldiers surf while on R&R;, and a letter-writer says he would rather stop Communism in Vietnam than in Kansas City.

But as each segment ends, an onscreen tally of casualties grows. Spirits sink. The stories and the sentiments become much grimmer, much more brutal.

In one amazing piece of amateur footage, we see a wounded older soldier on an operating table, coherently discussing the status of his leg, how he almost had to carry it back from the point where he was hit, how he had earlier decided not to napalm the area in question.

This segues into an excerpt from a letter by 1st Lt. Jim Simmen, writing to his brother after observing a man lose his leg and concluding with the thought: “You shoulda seen my brave men. It’d give you goose pimples.”

It does.

The movie covers the POWs, the nurses, Bob Hope, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, the astonishingly prescient Sen. Wayne Morse, as well as the grunts on the ground. It deliberately doesn’t cover the Vietnamese or Vietnamese issues behind the war.

The futility of it all, from an American point of view, becomes crystal clear as the film goes on. “I doubt if I’ll come out of this alive,” wrote Pvt. Ray Griffiths. “In my original squad, I’m the only one left alive.” And, we’re informed, he died soon after he wrote this letter.

The final scene is a harrowing combination of faces and names from the Vietnam War Memorial and a mother’s recent letter to her dead son. Like the movie as a whole, it salutes those who served in Vietnam while condemning those who sent them there. It should be required viewing for anyone who is tempted to forget.