By Rick Geffken
A new film about the hidden effects of a war most Americans would like to forget is garnering a host of awards in film festivals around the world. Holmdel filmmaker Tom Phillips’ “Vietnam Aftermath” explores the often debilitating internal wounds which veterans of the unpopular war have carried for the past 50 years.
The documentary has had overwhelmingly positive responses from film festivals around the United States and in countries such as China, the Netherlands and India. It was accepted by 119 international film festivals. “Vietnam Aftermath” has already won three awards, including Best Documentary at the Independent Shorts Awards in Los Angeles, and is a finalist for five more. Phillips and his film gain more accolades at every showing.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) entered the popular lexicon as a result of the Vietnam War. Previously called “shell shock” or “battle fatigue,” its severe symptoms were diagnosed as least as early as the American Civil War. The increasingly destructive power of weaponry from the Gatling gun through the helicopter-delivered rounds in Southeast Asia have had more than just bloody consequences. Whether on the receiving or sending end of technological warfare, many former warriors experience “a constant war inside them,” as one vet in the film proclaims.
Producer/director Phillips’ 30-minute documentary examines the lives of four local men, five decades after they left the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam. Eschewing “expert analysis,” Phillips lets these men describe their feelings, then and now. We see their wives too, offering emotional support, and recalling their long-ago fears of losing boyfriends. As young girls they struggled to read-just relationships with newly returned and haunted veterans, men who’d become so different from their once-upon-a-time prom dates.
Opening with old and grainy newscast coverage of the war, the film cuts to a slow flyover of the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Holmdel. We hear the unmistakeable “whoop, whoop, whoop” no veteran of the first true chopper war will ever forget. Phillips has deliberately recreated the chilling UH-1 flyover at the dedication ceremony of the restored “Huey” helicopter. Those of us in the crowd that day in May 2014 were stunned into silence.
Phillips said he took a very careful approach to this film, befitting the seriousness of psychological wounds many service veterans suffer.“I started it over a year and half ago,” he said, “I tried to edit it into something coherent, but it wasn’t working. So I came back to it later and tried again. I didn’t follow the standard format for television; the only narrative you hear is from these vets. I didn’t want to risk interpreting or summing up what they said. I wanted the audience to hear their stories in their own words.”
Courtesy Bill McClung
Why now? As one vet described it, “Men came home, put it behind them, started families. Now they’re sitting home listening to TV and something comes on, or they’re listening to music and a song comes up, triggers now that brings things up out of the back of their minds. That’s why a lot of vets today are having issues they didn’t have for the last 40 years.”
Retired men, only now comfortable enough to reveal what they’ve suppressed, tell us how they felt when they were young soldiers. “You’re very scared the whole over there. All I did was pray that I would live.”
“Everything outside (Viet-nam) was ‘The World.’ We weren’t in ‘The World,’ we were in hell.” Then again, “It was easier to fight the war than it was to come home and live your life afterwards.”
The somber background music throughout the film ratchets up the viewer’s apprehension, demanding a resolve that never comes. It just plays in endless loops.
Phillips uses subtle transition sequences between scenes. His camera lingers on a carefully maintained lawn for a slow approach to a veteran’s home. We sense that something scary lurks within. Inside, the camera tracks through hallways and down staircases toward voices overheard in a kitchen. When Phillips cuts to soldiers on patrol during the war, we understand how current everyday experiences can bring back hazardous missions decades ago. A popping birthday balloon causes a dive for cover from remembered incoming artillery.
Phillips started his company, G Street Productions, in 2015 after almost 30 years as a TV producer for three hit series and 27 Discovery Channel shows last year. But “Aftermath” is strictly a labor of love. “My father was a World War II vet and I listened to and saw the bonds he had with his fellows when they’d visit our house,” he said. Not a service veteran himself, Phillips said: “This film is my way of honoring these guys.”
Bill McClung of Little Silver is a former medic who served with the 1st Air Cavalry beginning in June 1969. He describes feeling overwhelmed by the hundreds of wounded men he had to treat during his time fighting against the North Vietnamese Army. While scrambling to help multiple casualties some days, “you had to do a triage and decide who you’re going to treat first, then second, then third. Whoever you pick, the second or third guy might not survive, so it’s a terrible decision.” Retired now after 27 years as a Johnson & Johnson executive, McClung said, “I think about Vietnam every day.”
“I’ve been lucky,” he acknowledged. Nowadays he volunteers at the Vietnam Memorial and brings his Vietnam experiences into high school classrooms throughout the Two River area.
Phillips expects “Vietnam Aftermath” to “run its course at the festivals first, then I’m sure someone will pick it up for a national release down the road.” When that happens, viewers may better understand the debilitating PTSD one vet in the melancholy film summarizes this way: “It’s more than just the war. The aftermath is so bizarre.”
Rick Geffken writes for The Two River Times; he is a Vietnam veteran.
