Hearts and Minds

In his documentary, Hearts and Minds, Peter Davis relies on pathos, showing real-life images and interviews of Vietnam during the war. He creates feelings of extreme guilt by showing the innocent, human being side of the Vietnamese people, and he creates anger through the merciless images and interviews of the American soldiers’ treatment of the Vietnamese.

Davis succeeds in making Americans feel ashamed of their role in the war. A soldier tells about an incident where a Vietnamese soldier is thrown out of the airplane because of a communication barrier. The next clip is a stern looking sergeant claiming how he doesn’t believe such things occurred. It creates anger as it appears that the sergeant simply "brushes off" the topic. Throughout the documentary high school football scenes of coaches hyping their teams to crush the enemy and win are shown, paralleling the American attitude of letting nothing get in their ways of winning the war. One soldier in an interview explains how he wasn’t even sure what he was fighting for; he just wanted to kill because they were the enemy. Another scene describes a sergeant’s pride at watching his men’s faces during a funeral, a solemn moment, that is interrupted when he adds the fact that they still looked like “a bloody bunch of good killers,” completely ruining the sincerity and innocence of the moment.

Throughout Davis shows us what effect the war had on the innocent- the ruins of Vietnamese villages, crying children. He shows multiple interviews with Vietnamese people all claiming the same thing, about the amount, from their homes to family, they have lost. There is also a part in the documentary where multiple Americans are interviewed and asked if the war has affected them; all respond that it hasn’t. One man even has the nerve to admit that he doesn’t know which side of Vietnam America is fighting.

Towards the middle though, Davis does show a scene where prosthetic legs are being made for American soldiers and even interviews a soldier who has been paralyzed. These parts of the documentary show us that even though the Americans are seen as the bad guys, and the Vietnamese as innocent, it shows that even American soldiers suffered too. Showing how both side suffered ties into Davis's main argument that the Vietnam War was drawn-out much longer than it needed to be, and also that many people lost their lives for nothing.