The folly of salesmanship is its duplicity – its wanting to promote something. To apprehend such deceit is to deadbolt the water gate through which the tides of persuasion wish to spout. After all, presentation is everything, and to be able to guard against it is a personal asset. John Kennedy believed in the power of brand name – if it worked for Coca Cola, he felt it would surely advance his trademark phosphorescent skin and magnificently serried red hair. Hitler used his inveigling power as a form of black magic – but the strategy of homogenization worked. Lambaste, until repetition becomes resonance.
Is there a sure-fire way to repel promotional mendacity? This question is pertinent to Gail Dolgin’s and Vicente Franco’s documentary, Daughter From Danang. Held in the brace of this film is the virtue of honesty – a light-emitting diode able to brighten the shadows of various subterfuges. Dealing with important political information, the film’s content may spur the incredulous viewer to question its historical accuracy. The film chronicles what occurred in South Vietnam after U.S. President Richard Nixon told America to get out in the early 1970s. We see the unfortunate dealings that anti-communists and anti-isolationists were initially trying to prevent. In essence, the film acts as a memorandum to the “peace babies” of the mid-1960s to 1972 (when American involvement ceased), explaining why U.S. aid was obligatory.
If South Vietnam’s tale of oppression – marked even further by destitution – wasn’t enough to declare fate the culpable source, take 85 minutes to screen Daughter From Danang. To fully evaluate – historically and politically – the one war America couldn’t win, a war the American public wouldn’t let America win – Daughter From Danang is fundamental viewing. The film charts a political period that was obsolete when it began. In 1975, under the new Ford administration, “Operation Babylift” was enacted. The resolution was passed in an effort to save Amerasian children – offspring conceived while American troops were stationed in Danang. Fearing the then recent edict put out by North Vietnamese senior officials that any trace of American blood would be torched, U.S. Congress sought immediate redress. Their mode of resolve was to put as many babies on as many cargo planes as possible. The result was the transport of approximately 75,000 children of mixed Vietnamese and American descent.
One such child-as-cargo, Heidi Bub, is the central figure of Daughter From Danang. Her earliest experience signals the first radar for all sceptics of U.S. intervention. Heidi was seven years old – not “an infant,” as Ford promised in his public address. The film’s seeming conjecture is one of a gauche America. But that seems to me just the kind of subterfuge I warned against – an objectionable personal slant. You see, though the severing of family ties in Vietnam was a horrible injustice – blame it on a reprehensible destiny. As Heidi (changed from Mai Thi Hiep) illustrates, the opportunities she was afforded as an American came as an act of divinity, compared to the omen of her less fortunate Vietnamese countrymen left behind.
Daughter From Danang is granted an easy pardon for its one social consciousness blunder. The rest of the socio-histo-political treatise is told in earnest strides. Personal illusion is deconstructed with poignancy as Heidi finally receives her wish to reclaim her birth mother, only to face the realities of cultural disparity and familial estrangement.
“I need to get out of here [Danang],” Heidi implores, and I empathize with such emotional uncertainty. As the film concludes, you’ll want to be in good company: the kind that responds to two-hour debate sessions.
