Performative citations of 1960s songs, Vietnam War movies, historical footage, and training manual details recur in interactions among these men as they prepare their uniforms and gear and then perform in the reenactment itself.

One reenactor’s helmet inscribed in bubble letters with the phrase “Sock It to Me.” Many soldiers wrote such messages on their helmets during the Vietnam War, and it has become a stock feature in Hollywood Vietnam War films. And now this one, too.	Joel Kinney delivers a lecture about the “proper” terminology to use while reenacting as Vietnam War soldiers.

When Nguyen arrives at the encampment, for example, he and Joel Kinney exchange bear hugs and the exuberant salutation “Good morning, Vietnam!” a joking reference to Nguyen’s ethnicity as well as the eponymous 1987 movie starring Robin Williams as a comedic, irreverent Armed Forces radio host during the Vietnam War. Other soldiers decorate their helmets with designs, flowers, and slogans reminiscent of the conflicted characters in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), a dystopian farce about the inadequacy of military training to aid a doomed unit of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. One reenactor wrote “Sock It To Me” in bubble letters on the back of his helmet, a term with such a convoluted history in popular culture that it is difficult to pin down the referent here for what seems to be a self-reflexive critique of the war and the soldier’s reluctant, enforced place in executing it.[9] [open notes in new window] J. Kinney teaches unsettling Vietnam era slang to the other reenactors through occasional references to fiction films. He encourages fellow reenactors to use the terms “zapped” for killed, “Dink” for Vietnamese, “peckerwood” for white man, “nape” for napalm, and “titi, which you’ve seen in Full Metal Jacket,” for “very little.” The first night under the tent, the group screens Easy Rider (1969) together while smoking cigarettes.

On the second day, the reenactors patrol the woods and participate in brief gunfights with the VC, played by several men dressed in black sweatsuits. The patrol, gunfights, and simulated death segue to deeper vignettes with the reenactors. Tuna describes difficulties reconnecting with his wife and children after returning from Iraq, and discloses that he will soon deploy to Afghanistan for a year. The unit of reenactors sees him off. Doc reflects on nightmares and the dead bodies he saw in Iraq as he carries a reenactor “Killed In Action” to a checkpoint, a scene I will analyze in greater detail below. The combining of footage from Vietnam, Iraq, and the reenactment proceeds more seamlessly and efficiently at this point in the film. When Nguyen captures two reenactors playing the Vietcong, for instance, a close up on his face cuts to a brief montage of armed ARVN soldiers standing uncertainly over presumed communist enemies in Vietnamese villages. The return to Nguyen’s close up in the reenactment leads the shots to read as something like a sequence of unbidden memories.

When it starts to rain at the reenactment by the evening of the second day, Nguyen’s subtitled voiceover in Vietnamese validates this interpretation. The sound of raindrops on a poncho reminds Nguyen of a moment of acute vulnerability during the Vietnam War, and he confesses to crying at the reenactment because he is overwhelmed by the rush of memories. Portland brewer M. Kinney, by contrast, revels in the rush of mock killing, blisters on his feet, and mild delirium induced by his lack of sleep. Bummy and Doc reflect on the impossibility of forgetting the things they’ve seen at war and discuss limitations they face in developing deep interpersonal relationships as civilians. The reenactment weekend concludes in the rain with the reenactors sharing a beer together back at the camp. The film ends with Tuna’s return home from Afghanistan to his family, and the unit of reenactors marching together in a small-town parade as a small boy in camouflage fatigues looks on.

When simulating “being there” falls flat:
the process of making In Country

The makers of In Country began production in a way recognizable to practitioners of observational and participatory cinema forms.  Once they secured access to subjects, Attie and O’Hara went to film them up close, waiting with camera and sound rolling to be surprised by unexpected contingencies or moments of surprising revelation.  They would occasionally ask their subjects questions, but not so as to disrupt the flow of ongoing activity.  From this material, they would distill moments in which stakes, motives, and human spirit shone through, and then structure the film for these hard-won discoveries to lead the audience to an enriched understanding of the subculture of war reenactment.

In practice, this entailed much literal and metaphorical walking in the woods—a fact reflected in the finished film.  In Country dedicates a good deal of screen time to shots of the reenactors toting replica (or perhaps actual) M-16s loaded with blanks and patrolling the Oregon foliage, a routine that seems to offer little in the way of filmable stakes until the interruption of a mock gun battle.  Attie filmed these patrols in anticipation of such a cinematic conflict, and the reenactment obliged.  I look at this moment here because the aesthetics of the scene reveal peculiar tensions entailed in “being there” to document the reenactment of events like those once filmed. 

The scene occurs about an hour into the documentary, when the filmmakers and their subjects are “ambushed” by several other reenactors playing the Vietcong. At the sound of gunshots—an unscripted event that cameraman Attie was nonetheless hoping and expecting to happen—the image on screen seems to lose its mooring to the cameraperson’s eye. The moment in the performance and the record of this moment that we film viewers see here touch precedent events in complex ways. Perhaps the reenactors on screen suddenly imagine being in a firefight Vietnam, or perhaps audience members watching the finished film think back to viewing “embedded reporting” of battles in Iraq or the fictionalized helter-skelter camerawork employed in the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan (1998). Perhaps it’s some of both. We viewers see the camerawork here transition from a handheld, but controlled following shot of subjects in front of the lens to the movement record of the cameraperson himself ducking into the weeds by the side of the road, not visibly focused, momentarily, on anything in particular in front of the lens. The referent for the camerawork is unstable, a “severed index,” in Schneider’s terms, like the prosthetic index finger in the grass pointing nowhere in particular that she stumbled upon with a surge of horror and then delight at a Civil War reenactment.  She then photographed the faux-finger for the cover of her book.

Attie, the observational cameraperson diving into the weeds, knew that he was not in real danger. This is perhaps an obvious point, but it is nonetheless a significant one. Shooting amid the grass was one choice among many at Attie’s disposal. He could have rushed into the trees to catch a few shots of the opposing army, or moved around to the front of his subjects so as to record their faces instead of settling for plants and backs. We might think of the camerawork as a kind of “unprivileged camera style,” to use ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall’s (1998) phrase for a camera that attempts to mimic the perceptual and cultural sensibility of the subjects (200). Attie’s rationale for the choice he made indeed seemed to express something like this logic. As he put it,

“When you’re shooting, you want to be respectful of the event and also to some extent playing along, and that’s the part of the war correspondent. You know you want to keep cover, you want to lay low because I think it would ruin it for them if I was standing up getting the ideal angle of the firefight” (Attie).

Perhaps in diving down into the grass, Attie was being a good reenactor, a way of being that direct cinema and observational cinema practitioners have long resisted, if not reviled as anathema to the serendipitous, immediate, spontaneous phenomena that the skillfully wielded camera could reveal when rolling amidst everyday life. Direct cinema pioneer Ricky Leacock famously compared the cameraperson recording everyday life to the voltmeter measuring electrical current: “you design your voltmeter so that very little goes through it,” he said. Leacock’s ideal cameraperson was co-present with subjects but barely there as a being, concentrating on framing, exposure, focus, and reacting with camera-body to live events in their unfolding. He said of this,

“We say we are filmmakers, but in a funny sort of way we are the audience. We do not have the burden of a director” (Blue, 409).

Since Attie and O’Hara, paradoxically, had to act in order to shoot the reenactment according to observational tenets (proximity to subjects, following rather than directing activities, and accepting everyday activities as events to record), their bodily orientations are at odds with Leacock’s theory of the observational cameraperson as audience member. “During the event, we were totally immersed in their fantasy world,” O’Hara and Attie wrote in an online article about the process of making the film for The Daily Beast.

“At certain moments they even talked to us as if we were actually reporters from the 1970s. When we were outside in the field, we didn’t ask them about their real lives. We reserved questions about their home life and experiences in Iraq for after the reenactment was finished in order to stay in character and fully inhabit their fantasy.”

The direct cinema goal of simulating “being there” is nonetheless the first that the In Country filmmakers have claimed in interviews with me and with others about what they hoped to do with the film. Stated O’Hara, echoing Leacock and more recent proponents of sensory documentary styles:

“I think we tried to give people watching the film the experience we had being there, as best we could, and used all these cinematic techniques that try to give people that feeling” (O’Hara).

I do not think this self-assessment accurately describes how Attie and O’Hara ended up making the film in practice, but paying homage to the value of “being there” has a long history in documentary filmmaking. The rhetoric of “being there” is connected to ideas about camerawork and the significance of direct, physically proximate access to subjects doing things. “Being there” has meant filming in such a way that the viewers of the footage would feel as though in the presence of events that unfold on screen, experiencing them from the perspective of the cameraperson who once recorded these shots live and co-present amid film subjects. The camera’s mechanical, indexical nature, in this line of thinking, would allow the unplanned footage to store up and then re-present surprising and organic details about the actual world that was once in front of the lens, revealing clues about the textures of landscapes and subjects’ lives for viewers to discover and consider on their own. Viewers are taken to be partners in thinking rather than passive recipients of cinematic messaging. And so attendant to this way of approaching documentary is the idea that the film should follow subjects whither they go, even into the weeds of everyday minutiae, while downplaying the political views of the filmmakers themselves. Attie and O’Hara say they share an affinity with this epistemological orientation. In an interview with me, O’Hara recounted one of their “founding myths as film collaborators” in these terms:

“It’s not that either one of us don’t care about films that could change the world, obviously, but I said to [Mike], I was like, you’re so clearly not in this camp of people trying to make lasting change through a film, and he was like, yeah, well, I don’t feel like I know the answer.”

The problem with this notion of “being there” with its presumption of humility and neutrality, as Trinh T. Minh ha (1993), Brian Winston (1993), Michael Renov (2004), Fatimah Tobing-Rony (1996), Jill Godmilow (2002) and many others have pointed out, is that it occludes choices and socio-historical forces: the choice to focus on a war reenactment instead of a more urgent subject—or even those reenactors who play the Vietcong. There was the need for two young filmmakers seeking academic jobs in a tough market to produce a cinematic feature documentary quickly and cheaply, and the fact that the reenactment offered ready-made production value, aesthetics of the outdoors, the hot-button theme of masculine vulnerability, and the “sexiness of the Vietnam War,” in O’Hara’s terms (O’Hara). A key tenet of critical race and gender theory holds that claims to neutrality often rationalize the norms of power in practice, like the tacit (and sometimes explicit) racism, sexism, and nationalism that creeps into war reenactments under the banner of historical realism. To follow and record such subjects as a means to understand them teeters close to simply projecting their values when the records find their way into a finished, edited film.

Such forces and others further trouble Leacock’s voltmeter analogy, and the attendant discourse about allowing the audience to “be there” to think about this and not that for themselves. Furthermore, there are limitations with observational filmmaking methods that practitioner-theorists acknowledge. Observational camerawork cannot reveal much about the psyche or intimate activities. Theorist-filmmakers in anthropology like Lucien Castaing-Taylor (1998) and Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz (2009) have simply argued that neither reenactment nor autobiography are as trustworthy as voltmeterish observation of everyday life in its unfolding. These filmmakers have claimed that sensory nonfiction films offer up significant, underexplored ways to create research about everyday life, cognition, time, and affect within the disciplines of anthropology and art. But the films produced by this school—to much critical acclaim and influence in their corner of academia[10]—have thus far generally embraced noninterventionist and realist traditions of camerawork, rooted in observational or gently participatory methods. Experiments with wearable and miniature camera aesthetics like Leviathan (2012), an austere feature pieced together from footage recorded by cameras ensconced on the bodies, masts, walls, and ropes of a New England fishing boat and crew amid a sea voyage, expand on observational cinema commitments to nonintervention, long takes, and the rejection of music, voiceover, and interview even though the camera’s view is not aligned directly with the cameraperson’s viewing eye. It is not a film that addresses critiques about power dynamics leveled at the observational mode and its fascination with staying in the weeds.

For the filmmakers of In Country who recorded reenactors, however, observation alone was not permitted, and they found that their approximation of observational camerawork “felt pretty flat” in their first assembly screening, in Attie’s terms. Somehow, he reflected, “you never really had a sense about what Vietnam was” (Attie). Reenacting the Vietnam War in the Oregon woods may offer cinematic capital in the form of outdoor aesthetics, controversy, and eccentricity, but the stakes of reenacting are in many cases internal to individual reenactors, or invisibly and intersubjectively present in the space between performers who share desires for connection with a lived past and commit themselves to discover something ineffable. The observational camera can’t see these spaces. And there is no organic “crisis structure” to follow that might allow a documentary to graft off this trope of Hollywood narrative structure, as in the direct cinema films of Robert Drew.[11] At the end of their shooting and first major round of editing, Attie and O’Hara worried that they had instead fallen for the illusion of reenactment, or the allure of simulation. They had a film about costumed men with replica guns walking in the woods, who then returned to their regular jobs. Notions of indexicality as mechanically reproduced photographic image inscribed on film or chip had led their documentary to a dead end.

But reenacting “being there” as Vietnam era journalists offered an unusual indexical possibility to the makers of In Country. It was almost as if by accident and through the coincidence of a shared ethic of camerawork with 1970s filmers of war—a shared “rolling gait,” if not exactly the same analog film rolling through the same kind of gate—their footage bore the potential to touch something of the past lingering in the present. This was touch not by the cameraperson’s image, but by the cameraperson’s unconsciously reenacted practices of recording.

Internalizing the archive:
the real of reenacted camerawork

Several years into producing the film, Attie and O’Hara realized that they could cut relatively easily between their own footage of the reenactment and archival footage recorded in Vietnam. A scene early on in the film demonstrated the potential power of this technique for recasting their “flat” reenactment footage. The reenactors are on patrol, and no firefight has yet happened. There is a sequence of shots of walking and waiting in the woods of Oregon. One reenactor, echoing 1968, places a daisy in his helmet. We, with the reenactors, are waiting, passing time in private spaces for reflection on and performance of a pastiche of history, popular culture, and escape from workplace routines. The montage ends with a profile close up of a soldier smoking a cigarette, subtly different from the previous shots in the sequence. The foliage in the background is different, the colors are softer, and the image is grainier. Then comes an aerial shot, more or less following the logic and rhythm of the spatial montage as though we are seeing the terrain in the same area at the same time only now from above. But the texture of the footage feels as though from another world. It is no longer the crisp HD video, and we quickly see that the verdant rice fields below are not the Oregon woods. We are looking at archival footage of rural Vietnam, shot from a helicopter, we presume, sometime during the Vietnam War. The disjuncture between the observational recording and editing style, and the self-conscious temporal rupture across this cut infuses the sequence with weight, difference, and stakes. This is Vietnam. The being there of these shots is that of the war correspondents of the 1960s or 1970s, re-appropriated in the editing room by contemporary filmmakers who had roleplayed as those correspondents and found their own footage of reenactors lacking. But because our entry point to the archival footage is through the contemporary reenactors behind and in front of the camera, we are primed to understand both their performance activities and the shots we are about to see as nodes along an ongoing continuum of time, a continuum we now enter as spectators of the film.

Beneath several further aerial shots of mountains, fields, and helicopters, we hear a soldier read a letter home about arriving in Vietnam amid a lightning storm. The helicopter lands, and we find ourselves with soldiers on the ground. We see an edited sequence of various U.S. soldiers walking through the landscape, finding a skull on a wooden post, and hacking through the bush, accompanied by audio recordings of U.S. soldiers talking or reading for the camera. Two soldiers carry a shirtless man between them who appears to have fainted. “I can’t walk through that kind of stuff all day,” says a voice. The image cuts to a ¾ shot of a different man lying on the ground, awake but dazed, and the cameraperson zooms in to an extreme close up of his face as a cold, off-screen male voice, presumably the journalist, asks, “What does it do to you?” The soldier responds, “Well, try to name something it doesn’t do to you. . . . Just can’t hack that stuff all day.” Another soldier voice reads a litany of uncomfortable sensations, “the heat, the stench of the air, the sick feeling in your stomach day after day, the smell of body odor and the choking dust in your throat,” as the montage on screen illustrates still more everyday difficulties. Soldiers walk through the bush and past the camera, each shot taken at a different time in a different place and featuring a different face. A wide shot shows a soldier in the middle of a stream, water up to his neck, holding his rifle above his head as he crosses—a point of reference for an early shot in the film of the reenactors wading across a river. A soldier waits as the sound of gunshots drones faintly in the distance, off screen. Then there is an interview with a soldier featured in the 1970 CBS television documentary, The World of Charlie Company. “It’s like pure hell,” he starts.

“I mean, like a lot of guys they hunted back in the world before they come over here. They come over here, they stay out anywhere from eighteen [days] to a month. Bugs biting on us, crawling all over us. You sleep on the ground, and you know, you’re humping all day long. A lot of guys, you know, they change opinion about being out in the woods. A lot of guys say if they go back to the world they won’t go out in the woods for anything, hunting or any other reason.”

As the soldier speaks, we see a montage that loosely illustrates what he is saying, soldiers slapping bugs, lying on the ground, hiking, and rustling in bushes as the talking ends. It appears that the soldiers are setting up an M 18 claymore anti-personnel mine that reads “FRONT TOWARD ENEMY.” We see a close up of the mine on the ground, wires protruding in several directions from its top. Then there is a straight cut to a claymore mine in the hand of a reenactor in Oregon, close to identical to the one featured in the previous shot but crisper in the HD footage, and sans wiring.

If we miss this detail, we still quickly catch on that we’re back in Oregon. The reenactors are going about activities of their own in the woods, digging foxholes and relaxing in hammocks. But we as the audience understand what they are doing differently now. We have been transported elsewhen and elsewhere by the footage of Vietnam, where the proximity of death is palpable and the circumstances are grave.

We might read into the reenactors’ activity here something like the “virtual gaze” in reverse, to adapt Friedberg’s term for the early cinema viewer. Friedberg argued that cinema spectatorship developed to meet the emergent structures of desire of the flaneur and the flaneuse, urbanites who strolled through shopping districts as a form of ocular pleasure. Walking through a city and taking in new window displays of far-flung, mass-produced commodities led urbanites to develop over time a growing desire for novel, pleasurable leisure experiences and an appetite for visual display. The cinema, for Friedberg, was more an extension of the “mobile gaze” of shopping than the realism of renaissance painting or the objectivity of scientific instruments. The “virtual gaze” they brought to bear on cinematic records of exotic locales, close ups, and movement allowed spectators to read the world as a window display offering novel affective delights and tools for the imagination.

We might imagine the filmmakers of In Country—and perhaps of filmmakers who employ observational methods more broadly—taking up the set of sensibilities that Friedberg lays out to turn everyday life into a palette of visual delights. With In Country, the archive expands in time and scope immeasurably, with instant access to footage taken over 50 years ago through online video platforms like YouTube. The virtual gaze is also virtually mobile, traversing time and space. With over 120 years of film and video footage available for reuse, the exercise of editing across different times is easier now than in times past, albeit incredibly labor intensive. And the reenactors themselves undertake the activity of media-informed walking as a pleasurable cinematic experience, a way to get at the experience of Vietnam. Friedberg’s shopping mall reimagined as the woods of Oregon offer up a host of grisly surprises, startling echoes of horrific events of the past that charge the present in complicated ways, as with the scene unfolding in Oregon.

As the high schooler Cricket finishes his foxhole, the offscreen voice of O’Hara says, “You told me yesterday that this was one of the better experiences of your life. Do you still feel that way?” He responds, “Yeah, for sure,” as a lower third identifies him as “David ‘Cricket’ Safina-Massey, High School Student.” O’Hara asks him to explain what he likes about it.

“I don’t know. It’s real. You have to work to get it done. It’s not like Boy Scouts where everything’s like, oh, you know. This is how it would be if it were actually real. Stuff actually happens. But yeah. This is perfect.”

He then discloses that he has enlisted in the Marines, which he will join after graduating from high school the next spring.

Cricket in this moment in the context of the film embodies the figure of the naïve young man who envisions military service as the route to authentic masculinity, only tested thus far in the sensory real of reenactment. Variations of this coming-of-age theme have played out in many U.S. cultural narratives from novels like The Red Badge of Courage (1895) to policy documents like The Moynihan Report of the 1960s to films like The Hurt Locker (2008) in the midst of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. There is a great deal of symbolic poignancy in the reenactment of this theme here, primed as we are by the archival snippets of soldier experiences from Vietnam. There is a scary reality to contemplate about the effects of simulation in Cricket’s underexplored conviction of reality in reenactment—at least compared to the Boy Scouts—and in his future trajectory as a Marine, where we imagine him if unlucky finding his own way to a “pure hell” that might make these Oregon woods anathema should he return. At his luckiest, he has still signed up to be an executor of U.S. imperialism.

Little of this scene, to return to the central argument about indexicality in documentary, stands on the observational footage alone. Cricket only speaks once O’Hara asks him a question, her dual roles as filmmaker of reenactment and reenactor of 1960s journalist converging. And the significance of Cricket’s understanding the real as a combination of moderate physical labor, imagination, and camaraderie with other reenactors stands out mostly because of the carefully crafted accumulation of archived sensory details from the Vietnam footage that preceded it. Vietnam plays in those thick instances as its mythology rather than through the particularity of a unit’s experiences. The anonymous soldiers on screen stand in for the quagmire of Vietnam, and the existential crisis the war posed to prevailing ideas about the virtues of loyalty and patriotism. In the re-appropriation of the archival footage, Attie and O’Hara frame the Vietnam War as historical and mythic. Their editing breaks up the close-to-the-ground reportage of 1960s journalists in order to emphasize affect, fragmentation, and lyricism in the soldiers’ brushes with death.

In this way, In Country’s treatment of the unit of reenactors with names and individual personalities is at odds with the film’s use of archival footage from Vietnam, in which social types and tropes rather than individuals emerge. [12] The shots from the archival footage accumulate in density, but do not progress. The Vietnam-era soldiers grope for meaning and purpose amid the physical discomforts of their everyday lives. They stand in stark contrast to Cricket and the account he offers about pursuing the real. It is a juxtaposition that allows this moment of the film to communicate an anti-war politics that might rather have read as farce without the context provided by the archival footage from Vietnam.

Cricket speaking to O’Hara, just off camera to the right of the frame, in a scene that blends elements of reenacting the past with a projection onto the future. Cricket will be joining the Marines after he graduates from high school, he says.