July 22–29, 1999

movies

War Is the Enemy

A Vietnam documentary unlike any other tells the stories of the women left behind.

by Sam Adams

February 29, 1968 is not a date familiar to historians of the Vietnam War, but it is one Barbara Sonneborn will never forget. On that day, over 30 years ago, her husband, Jeff Gurvitz, died in an army hospital after being wounded by a Viet Cong mortar at Khe Sanh. Speaking about it now, so long after the fact, her voice is calm but hard, the anger and sorrow of three decades compressed into a tone that accepts but does not forgive the circumstances of his death. In the course of an hour-long conversation, she refers to Jeff’s death several times and the language is always the same; without euphemism or retreat, she says simply: "That’s the day my husband was killed."

Now 56, Sonneborn (who has since remarried) was 24 when she watched her husband go off to war, and when she learned that he would not be coming back. For years, she dealt with her pain and outrage through artwork, photographic installations, metalwork sculptures and the like, settling in the Bay Area where she lives today. But as she tells the story now, she woke one morning in 1988 "knowing I had to do something about Jeff’s death, something that would reach the widest possible audience."

That something turned out to be Regret to Inform, Sonneborn’s elegiac look at the carnage inflicted by war on those who are not soldiers, but combatants nonetheless. In the 20 years since Jeff’s death, Sonneborn says she had met only one Vietnamese war widow, but she began to seek them out to find if other women’s experiences matched her own. And she determined that she would go to Vietnam, to the place where Jeff was killed, and interview women there, some of whom had lost whole families to the war.

Sonneborn says the decision to interview Vietnamese women was made at the very beginning, and she presents it matter-of-factly, as if there were no other way to tell the story. But it’s worth pointing out that for all the American movies made about the Vietnam War, none has so unapologetically and unflinchingly dared to present the Vietnamese as casualties and not just aggressors.

"We’re a very ethnocentric and Eurocentric country," Sonneborn explains. "We live safely within our own borders and have not seen war on our own land in anybody’s lifetime. I wanted to look at how war affected human beings, to go outside the arena of politics, and not say this side, that side, the other side. Let’s look at war: War is the enemy."

In one of the film’s most gripping images, Sonneborn shows the crude drawing she received explaining her husband’s injures. An outline of a man’s body with cross-hatching to represent the torn flesh and shattered bone, the figure chillingly suggests both the extent of his wounds and their commonplace nature. In essence, the movie audience receives the information the way Sonneborn did so many years ago, forcing them to ask, "What does it look like when someone you love is killed by a mortar? Are you willing to send your child to war, are you willing to send your husband? Or would you stand in his way with your own body if you really knew what it was like?"

That last question is particularly poignant, since it contains the seeds of so many war widows’ regrets. One subject interviewed in the film relates how she had planned to smash her husband’s hand with a hammer, thus preventing him from actively serving. Similarly, says Sonneborn, "I suffered for many years after Jeff was killed with [the thought] ‘Why didn’t I stop him?’ Just before he left, we were driving in our little Volkswagen, and I thought, just for a second, of turning the wheel and hitting a parked car. I didn’t want to get killed, but I wanted to stop him from going. But I was 24 years old, and he was adamant, and I didn’t know then what I know now."

In addition to those who lost family on both sides during the war, Sonneborn includes interviews with a woman whose husband killed himself because of postwar flashbacks, and one whose husband died of cancers probably related to Agent Orange. In including their stories with the others, Regret to Inform echoes a crucial sentiment voiced by one widow. The war isn’t over when the fighting stops, she says. "It starts when it ends."

In moments like that, it is clear that Sonneborn intends Regret to Inform as an elegy for all war dead, and a warning to those who would enter such conflicts in the future. "The film," she explains, "is about anywhere that people are tearing at each other’s throats. The notion that there have always been wars and will always be wars is a mythology that we subscribe to. Our killing power is so enormous now that if we don’t change our mythology we may well destroy ourselves. We haven’t grown in sophistication in relation to our technology."

In the end, Regret to Inform is about the cost of war, not just in human life, but on the soul, and the soul of a nation. In the film, Sonneborn admits, "What haunts me most is not just that Jeff died here [in Vietnam], but that he had to be a part of this at all." In an audio tape recording she received after Jeff’s death — one she couldn’t listen to for decades — Sonneborn’s husband confesses, "I feel as if I were a bystander at my own life, calmly watching myself do things I never expected or desired to do." One widow puts it even more succinctly: "Is my husband a hero, or is he a murderer?"

"Both sides were brutal," Sonneborn concludes. "War is a monster. The young men who were blamed for what they did in Vietnam — they were sent over to do a job, and the job was to kill as many people as they could. Vietnam vets have said to me that the question that makes them the angriest is when people ask them, did they kill anybody. What do we think they were there to do? They didn’t go to go swimming at China Beach."

The controlled anger swelling in her voice, Sonneborn reflects, "Jeff was killed in a war that our leaders have since told us was a terrible mistake. People come up to me at every screening and say, ‘This war tore our country apart and we have never recovered.’ I think that is profoundly true."

Regret to Inform, an Artistic License Films release, opens Friday, July 23, at Ritz Bourse.