American Experience: Two Days in October (2005)

excellent production

This film portrays, with great feeling and sensitivity, not just the history of this time, but the prevalent views of differing factions.
The first hand accounts are revealing, informative and poignant, and lead the viewer to feel close to the events which happened so many years ago. Thanks to the individuals who so candidly shared their personal and often tragic experiences for this film. November 27, 2008

Great historical documentary

This 90 min documentary tells two stories that happened on opposite sides of the globe on the same two days in October, 1967. The first is an infantry assault against the Viet Cong in Vietnam and the second is student protests at the University of Wisconsin.

The story is very well told, with interviews from all sides - they even found a Vietnamese officer who fought against the Americans! I thought it was a very balanced story that really gives you a feel for the political climate in the late 1960s and some idea about what was going on. Highly recommended.
July 19, 2008

The Vietnam War: At Home & Abroad

I have just finished a discussion with my undergraduate "History of the Vietnam War" class about TWO DAYS IN OCTOBER, which they watched the day following my lecture on "Search & Destroy: Westmoreland's Big-Unit War." The discussion was the best we have had in this class. The connections that TWO DAYS makes between the conduct of the war in Vietnam and the rise of the campus-based radical antiwar movement make this film essential viewing. TWO DAYS provides a rare glimpse into the life of the Regular Army, including interviews with the wife of the late LTC Terry de la Mesa Allen, Jr., as well as Delta Co. CO Welch, and First Sgt. Barrow. My students finally got to see what a real NCO looked and sounded like by watching "Top" Barrow's interview. But TWO DAYS also provides a look into the emerging antiwar movement (Professor Zeitlin, now a Distinguished Professor at UCLA, Paul Soglin of Madison, Wisc., et al.) and gave my students an understanding of why that generation's belief in "civic duty" drove them to the antiwar movement in the late 1960s. Now, this wasn't easy for me: in addition to being a history professor I am a combat veteran of Vietnam-Cambodia (Apr. 1970-Mar. 1971), serving with "Cold Steel Alpha," 2/7 Cav. First Cav. Division (Airmobile). Some things in the PBS production almost drove me to tears, but that is a good thing. As a teacher of history, I heartily recommend this American Experience production for classroom use. Clarence Wunderlin, Professor, Kent State University, Kent, OH.
June 29, 2008

Watch this before you enlist!

I was seven years old when these events occurred (although, at the time, I recall having the attitude espoused by the leader of the Black Lions (I was raised in a conservative area)). There are many fascinating facets to this film, but two hit me hardest: 1. The gung-ho, obviously exceptionally capable leader of the Black Lions and how the higher-ups abused/took advantage of this (and his troops') ability and dedication to have their own tickets punched to advance their careers and 2. The domestic authorities' mischaracterization of the causal factor of the student riot in Wisconsin. You really could NOT trust those in authority! Great weaving of interviews, including with the leader of the NVA ambush. Be sure to watch the extra tracts. Louis J Sheehan November 20, 2007

The most truth in one place. . .

I was a high school junior in Wisconsin, 90 miles from Madison, at the time of the "two days" covered by this film. Today I'm a high school history teacher in Ohio, and the next time I teach my semester elective on the Vietnam War era, I'm going to use this film as the opening exercise. It contains more truth about the war than I've seen in any other single presentation. It's not just about the Black Lions, not just about the UW protesters, not just about the war's politics, not just about the Vietnamese. Everybody's there-even the Madison police-everybody gets to speak, they're all presented fairly.

The film is based on David Maraniss' THEY MARCHED INTO SUNLIGHT, which tells the same stories, and a great many others, in far more depth. But given the constraints of a 90-minute video presentation, TWO DAYS IN OCTOBER is outstanding. With its use of vintage TV clips juxtaposed with modern-day interviews of the participants, it creates immediacy at the same time it gives the witnesses a chance to reflect on events decades past. I looked hard for bias, and didn't find any-although it's clear the film is a Rohrschach ink blot test. What you see in it depends on what you bring to it. So I'll mention what I bring to it: the perception that the higher-ups in Vietnam and Madison were in a fortress of denial, that they refused to accept the evidence of their own eyes. The Black Lions were victims of an ambush because an overzealous commander ordered them to advance when he shouldn't have, but Gen. Westmoreland couldn't admit it, even to himself. The violence at the U. of Wisconsin was perpetrated mainly by the police, who thus made a touchy situation worse, but the state legislators staged public hearings to blame the students and Chancellor Sewell because they couldn't own up to reality.

Other sources which deal with some of the same subject matter as TWO DAYS IN OCTOBER are the protester-friendly video THE WAR AT HOME (1979) and Tom Bates' moderate/conservative nonfiction account RADS (1992), about Madison's underground bombers. Both of them describe the Dow Day violence as part of larger stories.

I connect the authorities' penchant for denial to an anecdote that appears in THEY MARCHED INTO SUNLIGHT, but not in the film. In 1967, current Vice President Dick Cheney was a graduate student in Madison. Maraniss quotes him as dismissing the student protests as a distraction and a waste of time. Apparently Cheney was too busy with "other priorities" to learn anything at the UW that would have prevented him from leading our country into the current quagmire in Iraq. (And he's still in denial about the existence of WMD.) What a difference it might have made if only he had actually gotten himself educated about the difficulty of fighting insurgents or the dangers of plunging our soldiers into an unnecessary war.

For a quick encapsulation of America in Vietnam, there's nothing better than TWO DAYS IN OCTOBER. November 8, 2005

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