Based on Ed Emanuel’s 2003 Vietnam War memoir, director J.M. Harper’s film reflects on that conflict’s first Black special ops team—a long-range reconnaissance patrol in military parlance—that conducts operations deep into enemy territory. Emanuel, Thad Givens, Lawton Mackey, Jr., Willie Brown, John Willis, and Norman Reid enlisted during a period of intense domestic turbulence: they were in basic training when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated and on their deployment flight to Vietnam when they learned that Robert F. Kennedy had been killed. Harper’s compelling montage includes Super 8 footage shot by the patrol in Vietnam, photos, archival news clips punctuated by excerpts from Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech, and reenactments. Most affecting of all are the men of the “soul patrol,” who in conversation fifty years later, gather to reminisce and grapple with the profound, lasting reverberations of their shared formative experience. WM

Q&A following screening