Hearts and Minds

Peter Davis’s Academy Award–winning documentary is a powerful illustration of the ignorance, inhumanity, and duplicity of the arguments for US involvement in the Vietnam War made by those in power. Interviews with military brass, soldiers, parents, veterans, activists, and victims of the war are interspersed with scenes of battles, bombings, parades, football games, and funerals. This sweeping look at the war’s effects on both North and South Vietnamese and on Americans themselves “holds up a mirror to our national conscience, forcing upon us an assessment of our own immoralities and a probe of the values that created them” (Judith Crist).