Winter Soldier

The ICA should be congratulated for showing this seering, extraordinary and historically important documentary, made by the Winterfilm Collective in the immediate aftermath of the My Lai massacre. It consists simply of ex-Vietnam War veterans’ testimonies of wartime atrocities perpetrated on Vietnamese civilians – the whole gamut from gassing, through rape, mutilation, decapitation, to child murder and full out massacre – committed or witnessed by them, as recorded at a special conference convened at a hotel in Detroit, in 1972. This epochal film’s example has been instrumental in the setting up, in 2004, of Iraq Veterans Against the War for post-9/11 military veterans, whose equally moving testimonies can be viewed at www.ivaw.org/wintersoldier.