Documentary in Search of a War

Images of war carry a force the facts alone hardly ever sponsor. When American soldiers went to Vietnam, they also stayed at home, on television, in battle reports that droned for a precise interval and then ceased for 24 hours, and these few feet of action-news, as it is now called, clipped and framed and grimly packaged, helped to form and indeed were for most Americans the experience of the Vietnamese war. The effect was curiously abstract. Its technical adeptness had perhaps something in common with American management of the war itself. Yet there are images of a different kind that operate more severely on their witnesses. I remember, for example, a boy from high school, the only one I knew who went to Vietnam, an awkward, ...