The title of Errol Morris’s The Fog of War could easily refer to this pre-election season crowded with virtually indistinguishable anti-Bush polemics. It’s as if every filmmaker has conspired to get Dubya out of office by releasing one low-calorie documentary per week until Election Day. The latest is George Butler’s Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry, a classy “fuck you” to the frat-boy mentality behind ads that shamelessly accused John Kerry of feigning war injuries and bringing the atrocities committed by fellow soldiers during the Vietnam War to the attention of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Butler competently mixes archival footage with present-day talking heads (mostly friends and acquaintances of Kerry), and though the project is ostensibly about the presidential hopeful, Going Upriver really concerns all soldiers who returned from Vietnam only to discover that their nation had failed them. Some of the most powerful moments in the documentary are the glimpses of the 1971 Winter Soldier hearings, where Kerry was indoctrinated into the anti-war effort and where men tearfully came to grips with the horrors that they committed abroad. Equally powerful is a study of the day when many Vietnam Veterans Against the War threw away their medals. Butler acknowledges these soldiers’ gestures as rituals of moral and spiritual healing, as painful as lobbing off a piece of their hearts and minds.
It’s obvious from Going Upriver’s metaphoric title that the journey made by Kerry and many Americans like him after the Vietnam War continues today. If Vietnam is to Iraq, then Richard Nixon is to George W. Bush, and John O’Neill—the snake behind the Swift Boat Vote Veterans for Truth ads and the man Nixon pit against Kerry in 1971—is to, say, Zell Miller. Anyone familiar with Nixon’s opinion of Kerry or anyone who has seen Kerry’s speech before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee may find some if not all of Going Upriver redundant, but it doesn’t make it any less effective as an argument for an idea that continues to elude our current president: that it’s possible to be anti-war and still love one’s country.
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