The Tap...Tap Tap Of Courage

(2 of 2)

The other film, Regret to Inform--made over the course of 10 years by Barbara Sonneborn in memory of her husband Jeff Gurvitz, killed in February 1968--is a lamentation, an elegy for both sides in the war (the Vietnamese called it "the American War"). Sonneborn interviewed other American widows. She journeyed to Vietnam to find the place (Khe Sanh) where her husband died. She talked with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong women. The film has about it a terrible ache of sadness, and of truth.

Return with Honor is a story about warriors' deliverance through suffering and steadfastness. Regret to Inform is a kind of beautifully made poem, a cello piece, about grief--about war seen through the eyes of women and, as Sonneborn says more brutally, about the people underneath the warriors' bombs.

What links the two films, besides the war, is this: both arrive at a destination far beyond politics. We have got that far in coming home from the longest war.