Veering From The Wave

With the Swift Boat Liars For Bush dominating the news of late, I thought I'd take a slightly different tack as regards swift boats...

Last fall, I saw one of the most powerful documentaries I've ever seen on PBS' Independent Lens series -- Be Good, Smile Pretty, produced by Tracy Droz Tragos, a Vietnam War era orphan.

On March 16, 2001, Tracy Droz Tragos was surfing the Internet, entering family names to see if anyone had become famous yet. What she discovered instead was a first-hand account of her father’s death on a U.S. Naval swift boat in the Mekong Delta. At that moment, Tragos decided she needed to know who that twenty-five year old stranger was – not as a statistic, tangled in the memory of a war that wounded a nation, but simply, deeply as a man who laughed a lot and had blemishes and fears and wanted more than anything to come home and be her father. Be Good Smile Pretty is Tragos’ powerfully moving, personal exploration of her grief for the father she never knew, a grief shared by the estimated 20,000 Americans whose fathers were killed in Vietnam. Weaving emotionally compelling interviews with home movies, stock footage and family photos, Tragos travels from Selma, Alabama, to the U.S. Senate in search of her father’s Naval Academy roommates and war buddies, each of whom has been silently mourning his death and remember his life in their own way. What Tragos uncovers about the violent climax of battle is almost unbearable. But ultimately, it is the truth that allows her, and her entire family, to move forward. (Susanna Ulrich, IFP/Los Angeles Film Festival)

Tracy discusses her father, Don Droz, with her mother for the first time, exploring her mother's memory, letters, photographs and audio recordings. She meets with her father's swift boat comerades and -- while visiting the Vietnam Memorial for the first time -- she and her mother and grandmother pay a visit with an emotional John Kerry, who knew her father.

Buy this film for your collection... and keep lots of tissue at hand! It is a heartbreaking story in so many ways, but it is also incredibly uplifting as Tracy's relationship with her mother rises to a whole 'nother level as they both learn about a man taken too soon from their lives.