This is a follow up documentary by Michael Grigsby to his own 1970 documentary I WAS A SOLDIER which was one of the first documentaries to chronicle former GIs returning to civilian life in Texas after a tour of Vietnam . I haven't the original docu but the occasional clip from the original finds itself intercut in to this update . I had no knowledge of Grigsby so had a look at his IMDb bio and found he was English born and started making documentaries round about the same time as Nick Broomfield . There is a very similar between the styles of Grigsby and early Broomfield and that is the cinema verite documentary style , exposition and subjective talking heads intercut with long tracking shots of hometown locations devoid of voice over . I've got to brutally frank and say this type of slow , languid pace does harm the subject matter greatly but I know a lot of people will vehemently defend this approach on the grounds that there's no need to embellish the human subject matter and this gives it added poignancy
I couldn't help thinking - and I don't mean this in any cynical matter - that the style is deliberately done in order to tie in with the wests war on terror in the 21st Century and that there's a ready made market for listening to former servicemen returning from a combat zone and finding it very difficult to fit back in to civilian life . I do feel slightly guilty for pointing out that the Vietnamese weren't crashing civilian passengers jets in to American skyscrapers , that the American army of the 1960s and early 70s was composed of draftees and that the scale of fighting in Vietnam was incomparable to anything seen in Iraq or Afghanistan . As WE WENT TO WAR points out the experiences of returning servicemen from Vietnam in 1970 is almost certainly entirely different from what a present day serviceman returning from a war zone , so the 'Nam and the 'Stan are incomparable
