Vietnam War Widows Share Their Pain

Barbara Sonneborn was 24 years old when her husband, Jeff Gurvitz, was killed in Vietnam. In fact, in the sort of irony that could happen only in the movies, she was told of his death on the morning of her birthday.

“I was angry at the government for many years,” Sonneborn says, sitting in a Manhattan hotel coffee shop on a wintry day 30 years later. Now 55, she seems at peace, even as she continues, “When Jeff was killed, I never blamed the Vietnamese people. I blamed the government for their folly, for their mistakes, for their misuse of a generation of young men. I felt outside our culture.”

Sonneborn has channeled these feelings of rage, loss and alienation into a documentary, “Regret to Inform” (airing tonight at 10 on KCET-TV and KVCR-TV), about women like herself who were left behind and largely ignored--the Vietnam War widow. Though this is its first time on TV, it won the best director and cinematography documentary awards at last year’s Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar.

Ten years in the making, it began with a letter from Sonneborn to her husband on the 20th anniversary of his death. This “letter” then became a film, in which she told the stories of more than a dozen women from both sides of the conflict, traveling to Vietnam in 1992 with a translator-war widow, Xuan Ngoc Nguyen, and visiting the site of Jeff’s death. The result is a devastating look at the cost of war to both sides. As one of the widows, Norma Banks, who lost her husband to the effects of the carcinogenic defoliant Agent Orange, puts it: “It isn’t just the war is here and it’s over. It starts when it ends.”

Often in documentaries there is a star, an expert whose camera friendliness or storytelling ability steals the show. Sonneborn, the film’s narrator, wisely cedes the spotlight to her translator, Xuan, who lost her husband to a bombing raid when she was seven months pregnant. Clearly it’s not a role that Xuan sought. In fact, many of the widows were initially reluctant to speak but then found it liberating when they did so.

“It took three or four years to decide to be interviewed,” Xuan says now, her English fractured but vivid. “Like I open my chest and hand my heart out. I was concerned about is my heart going to be kept warm and beating or is it going to be cold and die? But so far I’m really happy, the nurturing that I receive.” Without posturing or grandstanding, her emotions very close to the surface, Xuan recounts her feelings of guilt when she took food that might have gone to somebody else, how she prostituted herself to American servicemen, how she immigrated to the United States with her second husband, an American military advisor.

“During the war, I hide from the bomb, I hide from the bullet,” she says, the anger evident in her voice. “And I come to this country, this is supposed to be a peaceful country, and you know what? I hiding again. I didn’t realize that coming to United States, I start another war, a war of survival, a war of I have to hide from own identity because of the treatment that I received when I first came here.”

Each of the widows had her own fight. For Sonneborn, it was her feelings toward the government. For Banks, it was the shame attached to her husband’s service in the war and his deteriorating physical condition. For Lula Bia, a Native American from Arizona, whose husband’s remains were nearly unidentifiable, it was her isolation, the sense that she was going crazy.

Indeed, one of the things the widows have in common is a feeling of isolation. So they have banded together, along with a North Vietnamese pediatrician, Dr. Nguyen My Hien, who lost her husband, Tran Dai Buu, in a bombing raid and now treats victims of Agent Orange, to tour the U.S. in hopes of locating other widows and communicating a larger message--that war is unacceptable, no matter whose side you’re on.

“We all lost our husbands,” Xuan says. “I cannot carry the bitterness or the pain toward the widow up north, because if I continue to feel that way, my children will feel it. So what are me and Dr. Hien supposed to do? We cannot give our sons a gun and say, ‘You two go kill each other so we can watch.’ If I continue to do that, I will use my own skin to make a pot, so that I can cook my own flesh with that pot. Which means I am myself enemy. I have to stop here now, it starts with me, with Dr. Hien, with all of these widows. It starts with us.”

A Documentary That Can Push Buttons

“Regret to Inform,” then, aspires to be about all wars and their consequences rather than just this one. But the movie can’t quite escape the bitterness and divisiveness that characterized Vietnam. Some who have viewed the film have called it anti-American. There is a lot about American bombs and American napalm and American complicity with a corrupt South Vietnamese government but very little about what the other side did. On the other hand, it makes the point that both sides suffered, and in that way it may surprise those in Vietnam who feel that Americans emerged from the war unscathed. (The filmmakers hope to take it to Vietnam in the fall, along with a group of war widows.)

“This film is a Rorschach for where people are in their own lives and whether they can hear the story,” says Sonneborn, who has a master’s degree in psychiatric social work and another in fine arts. “If something right off the bat makes them feel defensive, they’re not going to hear the rest of the film. I had an experience with a former South Vietnamese Army colonel who felt that way. Afterward his son came up and said, ‘My father can’t hear anything--he had such a terrible time with the regime afterward, he was in prison. But this film is so important for healing amongst the Vietnamese people, it should be seen by everybody.’ ”

To some degree Sonneborn was hamstrung by the Vietnamese while trying to get both sides of the story. She says she had no trouble filming interviews with North Vietnamese war widows (there is an extraordinarily powerful interview with a former Vietcong). But when it came time to interview South Vietnamese women who suffered at the hands of the North Vietnamese or Vietcong, the government wouldn’t cooperate.

It would be easy to say that this film represents some kind of closure for Sonneborn, and it does, but not in the way one would expect. She remarried a year after Jeff’s death, moved with her second husband, a jurist named Ron Greeneberg, from Chicago to the San Francisco Bay area, and became a multimedia artist. She’s been married now for more than 30 years and has long since come to terms with Jeff’s death. (None of the other widows on this tour remarried except Xuan, twice, both times to Vietnam vets, a not uncommon scenario.) However, Sonneborn realized that the war itself was harder to let go of, and that by holding onto it--that is, to her anger at the U.S. government--she was perpetuating the conflict. Over the course of making the movie, she found this anger “melting away.” She found something else too.

“Jeff died in a mortar attack,” she says evenly. “Whenever I would think of him over those years, I couldn’t think beyond this mortar attack. For many years I couldn’t see his face. In hearing the stories the women told, just the everyday events, he became whole to me again.”

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“Regret to Inform” can be seen tonight at 10 on KCET and KVCR.