Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

Saw Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam, a documentary based on a book of letters written home from American soldiers in Vietnam to their friends and families. In keeping with the bare-bones approach of the book, this is just recordings of actors and actresses (some good ones too! Robin Williams and Robert Downey Jr, oh my!) reading the letters over a backdrop of footage of the soldiers. Every so often a news-program will interrupt to keep us up to date with where we are in the war. It's an incredibly emotional film. The soldiers start off talking of how terrible the elephant grass and mosquitos are and then, as the war drags on, move on to homesickness and a numb dread of death. One marine writes of a beautiful flower growing in the war zone, surrounded by prickly, thorny plants. He knows the flower will be burnt up along with the thorns by napalm but it will live forever, he writes, in his memory. The film ends with a devastating letter written by a mother to her dead son, left on the Vietnam war memorial. "I wonder if anyone ever stops to realize that next to your name, on this black wall, is your mother's heart." It just ruined me. A deeply moving film about a still contentious war.