“It’s about the human cost of war and survivability in a community. It’s also how you go through something and survive it and come out the other side. And thank goodness a lot of these guys did,” Farinella said.
Donald See, Fred Bennett, and Victor Bean are three of the men Brooklyn filmmaker Samantha Farinella interviewed for her documentary “Hunting in Wartime.”
For some of the vets, her interviews released decades of bottled up emotion. As Ron Paul says in the film, many didn’t talk about the war when they returned.
“Everything you went through, you hide it and you’re smiling on the outside but you’re cold inside.”
Hunting in Wartime Trailer (updated 12/2014) from Samantha Farinella on Vimeo.
In some ways, the Hoonah soldiers had a lot in common with the Vietnamese people they were fighting.
“Almost every veteran I interviewed in the film says that they had a lot of respect for the Vietnamese people,” Farinella said. “They did feel close to them. It was a similar culture. One of the vets Fred Bennett said, ‘They come from a small fishing village like I did. They’re tight-knit with their families.’”
A new documentary profiles the lives of Tlingit veterans from Hoonah who fought in the Vietnam War. “Hunting in Wartime”premieres in the Southeast Alaska Native village Friday July 10, 2015.
See Full Story at Alaska Public Media
