Educational Media Reviews Online

Return to Dak To, a battle that should not have happened, is both a moving and misleading documentary. An engineering company is left to their own defense in a remote northern firebase in 1969. A North Vietnamese army assault was imminent, yet the US had no withdrawal plan. They went through two months of shelling and sniper attacks, with 40% of them becoming casualties. This is the story of four engineers who survived it and came back to Vietnam to finally put the war to rest. They travelled through Vietnam, meeting former enemies, seeing the changes in Vietnam and reached a form of emotional conclusion at the actual battle site. The travel is interspersed with archival footage of the Dak To firebase as it was back then, other GI photographs and interviews with the director’s military comrades.

Return to Dak To does a good job of showing how they needed to have closure from the terrible battle. Not only were they not combat troops, but one ended up killing a North Vietnamese Army (NVA) soldier in self-defense, which haunts him to this day. Right after the battle they ended their tour of duty and went back to an indifferent and sometimes hostile home land, not treated as heroes as they should have been. Other Vietnam vets will relate to this. However they were not combat troops fighting the Viet Cong and NVA as the main part of their duty there, so this is really a small microcosm of the Vietnam War. Engineering troops fought only defensibly, making roads, bridges and mine sweeping. The weakness of the film is the director seems to want to generalize it to all of the Vietnam War, then tie that to our ongoing war against terror as both wars were for “incomprehensible reasons.” This, I think, would be a massive insult to our former and current men in uniform.

This short documentary would be useful for illuminating topics like PTSD, returning veterans and for a sampling of the Vietnam War experience. Recommended.

Award

• Remi Winner, Houston International Film Festival