Teaching Guide to Regret to Inform

Film Quotes

Diane Van Renselaar:
He went over to fly. He was very patriotic. He'd spent his life playing football, and a navy attack squadron is like a flying football team. He was a member of the team and he couldn't let the team down.

Nguyen Ngoc Xuan:
I am fourteen at that time, and that's when the war actually touched my life. The bombs were dropping in my house. And everything we have, all the memories from my grandmother, my grandfather, everything go up to smoke and turn to ashes. I was confused. Why are they burning down my house, my neighbor's house? It's very confused to me. Then everything from there on, nothing is black or white. It's all grey, just like the smoke.

Barbara Sonneborn:
We call it the Vietnam War, but Xuan and everyone else I meet here call it the American War.

Nguyen Ngoc Xuan:
Until this day, when I run across an American man who was in Vietnam during the war, I look and see if I can find that eye again. Because he look—he has the horrified look in his eye as much as I do.

Barbara Sonneborn:
I remember before Jeff left, we talked about how afraid I was that he would get killed. We never talked about the fact that he would have to kill people, maybe even a child. I realized that we hadn't ever talked honestly about what war means.

Nguyen Ngoc Xuan:
I decide who live and who die. I'm going to live; my neighbor die. My girlfriend was hiding with me and she wounded. And we don't have a lot of food left. I took her portion, because I'm going to live. She badly wounded—she going to die—so I took her food for me. I'm fourteen-years-old, why do I have to force to make the decision like that? I don't even trust my 24 year-old son with a lawn mower sometime, but I have to decide who gonna live, who going to die.

Charlotte Begay:
He wanted to be patriotic. He wanted to help. But once he saw all of the killing of all the group, the Vietnamese, just looking like him—just about the same skin color, the same height—I think that really made him think, "What is he doing here?"

Troung Thi Huoc:
My sister had a newborn baby. And it wasn't safe to stay in the house. So she had to take the baby and mingle in with the dead bodies. Like a ghost, she came out from under those corpses, but then she feared the planes would shoot her. If you weren't dead, you weren't safe.

Phan Thi Thuan:
All I remember is after the shooting—after the killing—if the wind blew the tree, they chopped down the tree. If the cow moved, the cow got shot. And the chicken, duck, pig—anything alive was murdered.

Nguyen Thi Hong:
The Americans ambushed and captured me, and handed me over to the South Vietnamese army. They tortured me mercilessly. They hung me upside down from the ceiling by my ankles, and tied my big toes to a pole. They passed electrodes through the tips of each of my fingers, and through both my nipples. The cruelty that we experienced was longer than a river, higher than a mountain, deeper than an ocean.

Phan Ngoc Dung:
Of course, in the United States sisters, mothers and wives also feel pain when children and husbands are lost in war. But we lived in the country where the war was going on. The death and destruction were so horrible, so painful. We hope that there will never be war again, not anywhere, so that nobody, especially women and children, will have to endure that pain, that misery, ever again. It is very, very painful.

Jeff Gurvitz:
I tried to tell you in my letters how detached I feel from the whole situation. It's as if I were... it's as if I were a bystander at my own life, calmly watching myself do things that I never expected or desired to do, and merely marking time in a life which is too short to mark time in.

Norma Banks:
It isn't just the war is here and it's over. It starts when it ends.

Le Thi Ngot:
My son would ask me why his father did not return. When he got older he would ask, "Why did my father die?" I couldn't find the answer for my son. All I could do is hold him and cry. I also want to ask you, if the children—sons and daughters in America—do they ask their mother, "Why didn't my father come home?"

Diane Van Renselaar:
Is your husband a hero? Is he a murderer? What is he? Did he kill people over there? Yes, he probably did. And were these people a threat to his country? No, they were not. I don't see my husband as a murderer, but at the same time we have to look at it for what it is and... it is murder and is it justifiable?

Tran Nghia:
When I was young, I had hatred in order to defend my country and my people. Now there are not many days left in my life and there is peace. I can see that we are all the same, people there and people here. But if the war had not ended, the younger generation would be fighting just as I did.

Nguyen Ngoc Xuan:
In Vietnam, my neighbor's husband died. My neighbor's son died too. Sometime you ashamed to cry, because what makes my pain greater than my neighbor?

Barbara Sonneborn:
When I got home I came to the Vietnam Memorial Wall. I stand here on a rainy morning and try to comprehend the loss behind each name. The woman next to me is weeping. She tells me that her husband's name should be on this wall. He left his soul in Vietnam she said, but it took seven years for his body to catch up. He went out to the garage one day and shot himself. He left a note that said, "I love you sweetheart, but I just can't take the flashbacks anymore."

The Dreams

Barbara Sonneborn:
Last night I spent the whole night dreaming of countless horrible ways that Jeff might have been killed. Ways that other widows had told me their husbands died.

Lula Bia:
I would always dream about him. I couldn't really see him. His face would be turned.

Nguyen Ngoc Xuan:
I only see the arm, but the arm is really long... reaching out.

Grace Castillo:
I kept trying to tell him, "Don't go. Don't go any further, stay away."

Nguyen Ngoc Xuan:
I tried to reach out too and touch it, but I can't...

Grace Castillo:
And then there was an explosion.

Dr. Nguyen My Hien:
Once I had a dream that my husband came home, and he asked me "Why are you so sad darling? Why do you keep crying?" I asked him what he wanted me to do. He said, "You must stop crying and go on with your life.

For all the lives lost...
"They say:
Our deaths are not ours:
they are yours;
they will mean what you make them."