Airdate: We Went to War (aka I Was a Soldier)

Next week the History Channel screens filmmaker Michael Grigsby’s last film before he died, in which he revisits the men he filmed in the 1970s for a documentary about returned US soldiers from Vietnam.

In 1970, a young British director Michael Grigsby made one of the first films about veterans returning home from the Vietnam War – the critically acclaimed and award winning I Was a Soldier. We Went to War sees filmmakers Michael Grigsby & Rebekah Tolley return to the stories of those once young Americans, now aged and scarred by lives lived far too brutally, far too young and finds a shared sense of understanding with so many of those returning from the frontline today. I Was A Soldier focused on David, Dennis, and Lamar (three young soldiers recently returned from combat), as they tried to readjust to life back home in the heartlands of Texas, after a year on the frontline.

Some 40 years after the film’s first release, I Was a Soldier is hailed as “a classic” (Sight & Sound), poignantly echoing the experiences of soldiers struggling to reclaim such familiarity now, in the aftermath of Iraq and as the war in Afghanistan rages on. The act of war, particularly so in the last hundred years, has become one of the biggest question marks to be written against the word humanity: highlighting in the starkest of ways, man’s heinous insistence on being victor over itself at all costs.

We Went to War (aka I Was a Soldier) Friday July 19 at 8.30pm on History.