Soul Patrol

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.

Review from Variety

When Vietnam veteran Ed Emanuel wrote the memoir “Soul Patrol” (2003), the gesture could have been likened to that of a marooned man sending out a message in a bottle. Although he’s had a decades-long career in the film industry, Emanuel had lived with troubled memories of serving in the first African American special operations six-man Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol team. His tour ran from 1968-1969. As profoundly bonded as those men had been in combat, they’d lost touch in the intervening years. He hoped the book would find its way to his compatriots and if so, maybe they’d find their way to him. It did. They did. And the men began having reunions.

In director J.M. Harper’s haunting, revelatory documentary “Soul Patrol” — premiering at the Sundance Film Festival — the veterans gather at a hotel for their final reunion in 2024. The film features Emanuel as well as other “LURP” (as the units were called) fellow team members Thad Givens, John Willis, Lawton Mackey Jr., Norman Reid and Emerson Branch Jr., among others. “Soul Patrol” contributes a little-known chapter to the nation’s understanding of Vietnam War and Black history.

As the documentary opens, insect whirs and faint helicopter chuf-chufs mix with a choral hymn. An intertitle offers a quote commiserate with the music’s reverence: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how,” courtesy of the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche (who will be one of the film’s guiding muses). A handful of soldiers creep cautiously in the shadows while a voiceover narration sets the stage for the harrowing encounter central to the film. In Cu Chi, in the Southeast stronghold of Tay Ninh province, Emanuel had an out-of-body experience that he has grappled with ever since.

Read the rest of the review from Lisa Kennedy here...