Prisoners of a crappy war

In tapping on the walls, the walls came down -- not the physical walls, which did not crumble, but the more psychically dangerous walls that the torturers put between the POWs, of being separate and desperately anxious to get one's own pain to stop. And yet the torture of listening to someone else being tortured was worse than anything happening to them, which they were more easily able to bear. When they had come through another bout of torture, they tapped, in effect, Hello! I'm still here, and so are you; we are here together.

One of the most powerful moments in the film is an interview with a man describing a session of torture, during which he was trying against unspeakable odds not to break and give his torturer any useful information. He ran through every prayer he knew, and then he gave up; he thought, OK, you've got me, and surrendered to the pain. It was as if he had moved over a track, so that what was happening to his body was not even relevant, that it was happening over on another track. And his prayer was answered: Finally out of the loop of resisting, he felt freedom from pain and fear. Moments later, the torturer fell apart, crying, running from the cell, shamed. It was as if the torturer saw something so profound that it can't really be put into words -- but, to try: such goodness, something so big, so shining, so full, like seeing source -- that he saw that what he was doing wasn't working. Maybe he finally felt the bond of being human, lost the distinction between us and them and just saw the us.

Vietnam was so long ago that it's sometimes almost quaint, and it's hard not to feel that it's over. But it's not. The deep wound of this war is just less obvious, like an old abscess you've gotten used to. Watching this movie I never felt ashamed that I protested. It was a crappy war. But at the same time, I've never before felt such profound pride in our military.

Listening to the American pilots (and their wives -- tender, feisty, tough, loyal, as heroic and articulate as any of the pilots themselves) will leave you stunned with admiration, for what and how they endured, for how far gone they were, and how one step at a time they came back from that. One pilot speaks so calmly that he could be discussing sports technique, yet what he's talking about is his effort to commit suicide by smashing his head against the wall of his cell. Another man describes and then displays the drawings he made in his cell using the discharge from his infected wounds. One pilot demonstrates his memorization of the names of 200 POWs, a rapid-fire mental ticker tape stream that he could give to his commander when he got home.

"Return With Honor" is finally about humanity, about people under extreme duress who have had to jettison all they knew before, all security and comfort, like people you may know who've had cancer or lost a child. They came through reaching for courage, with the best of being human, and so we listen. The ego here has fled; there's not one vainglorious phrase in any of the interviews. All they had to deal with was what was -- and what was in this case was about as terrible as could be. So they did the best they could, with what they had to work with, and at first it seems like so little, but turns out to be as big as life, as breath, faith, concern for others. Somehow even in their cells they sometimes found the spaciousness of hope and friendship; somehow, more often than can be imagined, they praised the day.

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