Return with Honor (1999)
Return with Honor (1999) A masterful documentary. Terry Sanders and Freida Lee Mock were commissioned by the USAF Academy Class of 1965 to create a remembrance of the captivity experience of U. S. Naval and Air Force POWs, flight officers taken and held in Hanoi from 1964 to 1973. Sanders and Mock use stock footage and personal POW interviews. More importantly, they traveled to Hanoi and worked with the Vietnamese government to obtain and use film from its war archive as well as to freely photograph scenes from modern Hanoi.
They filmed long unused rooms in the Hoa Lo Prison, built by the French and known as the “Hanoi Hilton” to the Americans. They were given access to films taken by the Vietnamese captors of individual POWs.. Although the title uses George E. Day’s fine book, Return With Honor (1989), structurally the directors used Robert C. Doyle’s Voices from Captivity (1994) to make sense of the American POW experience. Sanders and Mock have created what is probably the best documentary of captivity during the Vietnam War.
Robert C. Doyle Franciscan University of Steubenville rcdoyle@sbsglobal.net
