The voices of Vietnam veterans are honored in free Relic Room lecture – April 27
April 23, 2018
“If you let it stay inside,” said a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, “it’ll eat you away.”
But too many veterans, particularly of that war, have tended to keep their experiences bottled up inside them. As another veteran said, trying to explain what happened in Vietnam to non-veterans can be like “trying to tell somebody how to swim that’s never been in water. You can’t do it.”
But filmmakers Ray and Andrew Smith got some of those veterans talking about it, and the result was a beautiful little documentary called “Voices from Vietnam: Reflecting at the Wall,” which has been shown on South Carolina Educational Television.
Ray Smith of Blythewood, producer at Modos Media, will talk about the film on Friday, April 27, at the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum in Columbia. With him will be some of the veterans from the documentary. The presentation will start at noon. It is free and open to the public, as part of the museum’s monthly Lunch & Learn series.
The film had its genesis when Ray and Andrew learned that “The Wall that Heals,” a traveling replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall in Washington, was coming to Blythewood over the Memorial Day weekend in 2016. They showed up with their cameras and started interviewing veterans and family members who had come to see the exhibit.
“I realized it would be a cathartic and catalytic event for a lot of people,” says Smith. And it was. “In some cases, they told us that we were the first people that they had ever spoken to about their experiences.” From talking to the interviewers, some of them went home and had conversations with their families – and doors were opened that had been closed for five decades.
“I didn’t really know a lot about the Vietnam War,” Ray Smith says in his British accent. “I’m from the UK. I had sort of watched it on TV.”
“Because of the misunderstandings and controversies surrounding the war,” he says, “I wanted to know about the veterans, and who they were and what happened there and when they came back.”
The resulting 25-minute film aired on ETV in 2017, just a few months before Ken Burns’ celebrated series on the war. The voices in the film are frank about what the veterans experienced in Southeast Asia, as well as when they came home.
“We killed a lot of them; they killed a lot of us,” said one veteran. “But, I mean, it was just something I was there to do… They send me over there to do a job; I did my job the best I could…”
Explains another, “I was very proud to be doing what my country had asked me to do. But when I came home, we were being spit upon. Blew my mind.”
The film, and the lecture at the museum on April 27, are about a nation’s need to come to terms with all of that.
About the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum
Founded in 1896, the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum is an accredited museum focusing on South Carolina’s distinguished martial tradition through the Revolutionary War, Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the War on Terror, and other American conflicts. It serves as the state’s military history museum by collecting, preserving, and exhibiting South Carolina’s military heritage from the colonial era to the present, and by providing superior educational experiences and programming. It is located at 301 Gervais St. in Columbia, sharing the Columbia Mills building with the State Museum. For more information, go to https://crr.sc.gov/.
