Return With Honor: The American Experience (1999) Review

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(More customer reviews)The definitive documentary about life inside the notoriously brutal POW camps of North Vietnam - told by the American servicemen who lived it. Extraordinary historical footage combined with the reflections of the men some 25 years later makes this a compelling film. You will be inspired by their courage, touched by their humanity and confessions of weakness and fear, and then re-inspired by their enduring loyalty to each other. Kept in solitary, tortured, and forbidden to communicate with each other, it is a wonder they survived. Amazingly you learn how they did develop ways to cope and communicate, such as by using a "tap code" on the walls to communicate with men in adjoining cells. As one ex-prisoner puts it, some nights we had the Hanoi Hilton "sounding like a den of runaway woodpeckers." This remark is typical of the reflections you hear from the ex-prisoners. The men are never bitter, despite the fact they've been through a living hell. They are never pedantic and anxious to tell what great life lessons they've learned from the experience. They simply tell their story. Their wit and humor keeps Return With Honor from ever becoming akin to a depressing war move. Regardless of political opinion about the Vietnam conflict, almost every viewer will come away with an admiration for these Air Force and Navy officers who scarified so much in service to their country.

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RETURN WITH HONOR tells the powerful, moving story of American pilots shot down over North Vietnam and their challenge to survive with honor as POW's. A tribute to heroism, endurance, and brotherhood under duress, the film recalls the transformation from top-gun aviators to captives. Told in their words, rich with survivor humor, and complete with North Vietnamese archival footage, the film is a universal story of honor and duty.

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American Experience - Ulysses S. Grant, Warrior President (2002) Review

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(More customer reviews)I have always been ambivalent about Ulysses S. Grant, both as a General and as a President. His record as a General was one of success, but at the expense of an enormous amount of blood. His administration was rocked with scandals, so severe that had they happened in modern times, it is unlikely that he would have survived as President. Yet, his greatest failing was also his greatest strength. He was a man of utmost character and principle, and he found it difficult to understand that other people did not share those traits. Lacking this sense of cynicism towards others, it was impossible for him to anticipate the unsavory actions of his nonmilitary associates. This is all the more unusual, because he never had any difficulty discerning the deceptive practices of his battlefield opponents.
This tape has forced me to rethink my opinion of Grant the General. His record of successive victories is largely unmatched in American military history, and his conquest of Vicksburg was one of the most well-planned military operations in the history of the world. He also was a great strategic thinker, understanding that the fall of Vicksburg doomed the Confederacy. Until I viewed this tape, I had no appreciation for Grant as an original military thinker. After seeing the descriptions of how he carried out many of his campaigns, it is clear that he was a great military commander and the person most responsible for the Union victory.
My opinion of his presidency has also been rather low, but this tape has forced a serious upward revision. He faced enormous problems, the intransigent elements in the South refused to accept anything but apartheid, and if Grant made a mistake, it was in realizing that military defeat did not change the attitudes in the South. He just could not comprehend the deep hatred for blacks that was a fundamental part of the psyche of so many southern whites.
This tape also reminds us that the United States citizenry has experienced terrorism in the past. The white supremacist groups that arose after the Civil war terrorized blacks and white sympathizers for almost a century. People were brutally killed, homes burned and bombed so that black people were forced to accept a denial of their rights as citizens. Grant did all he could to help the freed slaves, but the country had no stomach for any additional federal action and most people just wanted the whole problem to go away. Ironically, the one solution that may have worked was for the U.S. to annex the Dominican Republic and turn it into a state that black people could migrate to. Grant proposed the plan to congress, but few were willing to accept a black run state on equal terms with all others.
This tape is one of the best in the biography series produced for PBS. Grant is truly an American hero, and like so many, was humble in his enormous success. If he had not been there to save the union, it is doubtful that Lincoln could have done it. I enjoyed this tape so much, I watched it twice just to see if I had missed anything the first time.

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Ulysses S. Grant was an American paradox. A failed businessman, he became a brilliant military strategist whose destruction of a defiant South gained him the label "butcher." Elected president in 1868, Grant lacked the skill to deal with reconstruction and the nation's economy. His two terms were rocked by racial conflict and corruption scandals. Financially ruined, Grant spent his final days battling cancer to finish his war memoirs

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