Last Days In Vietnam (2014)

LAST DAYS IN VIETNAM  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Rory Kennedy
I found myself wondering, while I was watching this documentary, exactly when the word "clusterfuck" entered the American vocabulary. It'd be hard to come up with a more accurate one-word description of the country's long, botched, murderous military involvement in Vietnam. The movie zeroes in on the tail end of the debacle - the chaotic evacuation of Saigon in the spring of 1975. Most of the witnesses are people who were there - South Vietnamese desperate to escape, and the U.S. officers, embassy guards and helicopter pilots who devised their own black-ops schemes to get as many people out as they could. They're not quite apologists for the cause - the movie's decidedly circumspect about that - but they share a strongly held belief that the evacuation was a catastrophe and that abandoning the Vietnamese who had been our allies was an unforgivable betrayal. It's just one chapter in the story of the war, and Kennedy keeps the focus squarely on people. The stakes are high because the scale is human, and everybody's caught in the clusterfuck.