In 1968, when Lawton Mackey Jr. was just 17, he forged his mother’s signature so he could enlist in the army. It had to be, he thought, better than earning $3 a day as a field laborer in South Carolina. But by the time he got to Vietnam, he was already regretting his youthful decision.
War — both abroad and at home — serves as the compelling center for J.M. Harper’s exceptionally moving documentary, “Soul Patrol.” But the men who fought, and who in many ways are still fighting, provide its enormous heart.
There were six of them in Company F, 51st Infantry. They were Black teenagers escaping poverty or boredom, fulfilling filial or personal duty. By the time they came home, all they wanted was to forget everything they’d seen, heard, and done. But eventually, as a way to process his pain and honor their time, one of them, Ed Emmanuel, wrote “Soul Patrol,” the 2003 memoir that inspired Harper’s film.
Harper aims to take us all the way through the soldiers’ experience, and he succeeds in powerful fashion. We learn about the circumstances that led the men to enlist, and the shock that hit when they discovered what they’d signed up for. He uses their own footage, shot on Super 8 when they were in Vietnam, and he captures them in intimate interviews more than 50 years later. He also stages experimental but sensitive re-enactments — which he calls “adaptations” — to convey emotions the men may still be processing.
For they were not merely young enlistees, but members of the first Black special-ops unit in the war. They were sent on intensely dangerous missions behind enemy lines, and their official title was the Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol (which they call LURP). But other soldiers dubbed them — to the annoyance of some — Soul Patrol.
Harper also pays close attention to the explosive events going on simultaneously back home in 1968: the violence and civil rights abuses, the obscene cynicism of leaders who would never put themselves in harm’s way. We hear of the ideals, the music and the family that kept them going when they couldn’t bear another second. And we learn that although Black soldiers were both represented and killed in higher numbers than their white counterparts, they were barely acknowledged by the media.
There were, in fact, seemingly countless ways in which these young men were devalued by the country they served. Some even hid their veteran status for decades. Today, it seems impossible for anyone to remain unmoved by Harper’s thoughtfully-constructed history, from the first introductions to the unexpected but effective final scene, set to the Blind Boys of Alabama’s “I Shall Not Walk Alone.”
“It took me 35 years to admit I came from Vietnam,” one veteran confesses. “We were there,” another insists, with a defiance earned half a century ago. “We were there.” Harper has done them, and us, a tremendous service by documenting their long-overlooked stories with such clear-eyed care.
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