THE LONG WAY HOME PROJECT
Some people don’t like the military. They like to sit in their comfortable homes, or in nice restaurants, or at "peace rallies" and complain about the men who risk death so they can live in comfortable homes, eat at nice restaurants, and have the freedom to attend political rallies. These sorts of people particularly didn’t like the war against communism in Vietnam and, unfortunately, these are the people who have written the history of the Vietnam War and that war’s veterans as it is commonly told.
The Long Way Home Project attempts to combat this perspective. Its four-part, three-and-a-half-hour video series paints a picture of the war and the men who fought it in colors very different from those in commonly used history books and documentaries.
"Most of the material done on the war takes the view that the war was wrong and so the men who fought it must be denigrated," said Calvin Crane, the series’ director and director of the Long Way Home Project. "One of the main differences from our series is perspective."
The series, introduced by Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf (Ret.), defends America’s involvement in Vietnam in the context of both our national interest in the containment of Communist aggression and the desire to help the South Vietnamese people.
"President Kennedy said in his inaugural address that we would go anywhere and pay any price for freedom," said Crane, who was an Army combat photographer in Vietnam, 1968-1970. "We [Vietnam veterans] believed that. We felt that very strongly. We grew up in the ’50s. We grew up under the threat from the Soviet Union. A Washington Post survey done six years ago showed that 91% of Vietnam veterans were proud they had served their country, and 66% said they would serve again if called."
The first part of the series, titled "Men Versus Myth," features Vietnam veterans saying that commitment to the war and morale was strong among the men in Vietnam until President Nixon began pulling American troops out of the country. Returning vets suffered another blow, they said, when they returned home and, instead of encountering gratitude and respect, they faced indifference or even contempt from an America transformed by the ’60s revolution.
"You thought you were doing a great job and a service to your country and when you came home, there was all this hostility," said Bob Martinez, the series’ executive producer and Republican National Committeeman for Colorado. Martinez served in Vietnam as part of the Army’s psychological operations group. He said that it can be difficult to get Vietnam veterans to talk about their experiences, an attitude common among combat vets.
Said Crane, "Many of the documentaries and films they have done with veterans have never been checked out." He recounted stories from dishonest people relayed by Dan Rather and by now-Sen. John Kerry (D.-Mass.) that have been proven false.
Crane’s company, Denver-based Flickers Films, won the 2002 Gold Special Jury Award for the series at the Houston International Film Festival.
The project provides statistics to back up its claim that Vietnam veterans are far from the poor, uneducated mass that they are often portrayed as being. One-quarter of combat deaths were of men who came from families in the upper-third income level, and "79% of the men who served in Vietnam had a high school education or better when they entered military service," says the project’s website. "As of 1985, only 9% of Vietnam veterans had not graduated high school as opposed to 23% of their non-military peers. As of 1985, a Vietnam veteran was more likely to have gone to college than a man of his age who did not serve: Vietnam veterans-30%; non-military peer-24%."
Also, despite liberal claims that the Vietnam war exploited blacks, the project notes that "Overall, African-Americans suffered 12.5% of the deaths in Vietnam at a time when the percentage of African-Americans of military age was 13.5% of the total population."
As for why we lost the war, it had nothing to do with the military men’s performance-the military never lost a major battle in Vietnam, the series notes-but was the result of bad civilian decisions in Washington.
The Long Way Home Project is working with veteran’s associations to distribute the series, which can be ordered by individuals, and is trying to get it into high school classrooms. So far, PBS and cable channels have taken a pass on airing it, said Crane. A certain sort of person doesn’t like it, he said. "It kind of brings into question your patriotism and your whole validity as a protester," he said. "Those are the sort of people you find working at these networks."
The project can be reached at 800-945-2478 (www.longwayhome.net).
