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THE DISAPPEARANCE OF McKINLEY NOLAN and RESTREPO at Silverdocs

Published on July 7, 2010

by Enrico Cullen

The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan and Restrepo both screened at Silverdocs two weeks ago. On the surface, these films might seem similar. Both films are about war, Vietnam and Afghanistan respectively. Both films attempt to reveal truths about life in combat by the specific ways they were shot and edited. And yet the differences are stark.

Last Saturday, McKinley Nolan’s wife Mary, his son Roger, and his brother Michael, sat with me for an interview in the lobby of a local hotel in Silver Spring, Maryland. One of the first questions I asked Michael had to do with memories of his brother that were not included in the film.

Roger Nolan, Ollie Madison and Michael Nolan in Texas reminiscing about life when McKinley was alive.
Photograph by Henry Corra

Michael said, “I have a photo of McKinley at the well. Remember that Mary? I was going to bring it with me ‘cause I have nothin’ of him growin’ up. Innocent. He was just drawin’ water at the well. He didn’t have no idea about what his life would be like.”

McKinley Nolan, chameleon-like, has been considered a hero, a captive, a deserter and a defector of the Vietnam War. Many are convinced he is dead. Some hope he is still alive. In telling me about the childhood photo, Michael also told me a little bit about why this film and Director Henry Corra’s style makes sense for this particular story.

Perhaps more than any other war film I have seen, The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan lingers on what I suspect might be true for more than a few soldiers: an ambiguous emotional relationship to violence. There is attraction and repulsion. The film premiered at Silverdocs last week and tells us about a man who left rural Texas for Vietnam, won a Purple Heart and then disappeared. “I’m thinkin’ his first year, he probably loved [being a soldier],” said Michael, “because he ended up with a Purple Heart.”

The Nolan film captures moments of memory with enigmatic glimpses of Vietnam, Cambodia and Texas. You can see this technique at play in the trailer. In strict journalistic terms, these scenes were chosen loosely and do not adhere directly to the story. However, they often help to elevate the emotion and seem to achieve a higher sense of the truth behind what happened.

In contrast to films that purport to document the truth, The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan aims to create a testimony of truths and half-truths. In fact, according to journalist and writer Richard Linnett, who was also a consulting producer on the film, The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan is being used in an effort to bring the Khmer Rouge to trial. Michael Nolan, McKinley’s brother, hopes to appear in court as a civilian. In fact, “That’s what the film is there to do,” said Linnett. “It’s there to justify Michael’s application to appear as a civil party in a prosecution trial of the Khmer Rouge.” McKinley is one of only two officially recognized defectors from Vietnam. U.S. defense and intelligence offices apparently knew where McKinley was while he was either deserting or defecting, depending on your version of the story, but they didn’t go to get him, either to detain him or to rescue him. McKinley is not on the Vietnam Memorial now because he has not been officially declared dead and because the U.S. military believes he betrayed his country. According to Linnett, the U.S. military is sticking with that story, a truth that is presumably convincing to them. This is a source of sadness for his family.

Some of the scenes in The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan are highly stylized and polished. In the mulling crowd after the Saturday screening at the 400 seat AFI Silver Theater, more than one audience member told me that the images sometimes appeared too slick and took something away from the emotional pull of the story.

Michael Nolan and Thach Quang (McKinley Nolan’s adopted son) meeting for the first time.
Photograph by Henry Corra.

I found myself unable to shake the image in the photograph of a five-year-old McKinley at the well that Michael had conjured up for me. It stood before me like a single frame from a film that was never made. “He was wearin’ a tweed shirt,” said Michael, “or a plaid shirt and jeans and, believe it or not, he had a gun… a toy gun.” I felt as though I were looking through The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan at his life, as it was depicted in a photo I had never held in my hand, but which was described to me affectionately by his brother.

It would be a stretch to say that the toy gun on McKinley’s hip foreshadowed his future life in the military. And yet this is precisely what Michael suggested to me, not as hard fact, but as a gentle musing on his brother’s life and its meaning. Apart from its reality as a piece of plastic or wood in an old photo, the toy gun does seem to express a form of truth that we tell ourselves, one that is not solely based in a narrow understanding of experience. Perhaps there’s always a shadow between the facts and the truth, an opening when meaning is made.

Restrepo, a second film about war, also roused audiences at Silverdocs. One of the great successes of Restrepo, in contrast with The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan, is the apparent documentation of the “real deal” about war in Afghanistan. It feels real. At every moment we bear witness to war in action. It’s a convincing, pared down depiction of a brutal experience. The images are bright with texture and unambiguous reality. The experience is arresting and full of bravado, violence, tenderness, sadness, terror and playfulness.

Specialist Misha Pemble-Belkin (l.) and fellow soldiers from Battle Company, 173rd US Airborne during a firefight at Outpost Restrepo during combat in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. A film still from the documentary Restrepo by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger.
Photograph © Tim Hetherington

And yet I walked away from Restrepo feeling a strong sense that the filmmakers had missed an opportunity to tell a meaningful story. Throughout the film I had trouble distinguishing one soldier from another. Watching one of the most powerful scenes in the film, I could not figure out who had been killed and who was distraught over the killing. This is a failure of character development in cinematic storytelling. We really must know who those soldiers are in a clear way to grasp the magnitude of what is happening. Without that, we slide by the scene as violence junkies without morality. All of this makes me wonder why this kind of documentation can appear so convincingly real and still seem to miss the point.

The camerawork in Restrepo stays close to the action and rides the frat-house camaraderie of Restrepo outpost, a small fort named after a fallen soldier at the edge of a cliff in the Korangal Valley, Afghanistan. When coupled with peaceful interludes, the badass raucousness can give a sense of truth, but it misses a big question that this sense of truth strongly suggests: Why are they there? Restrepo’s depiction of truth is too narrow, too simple to be wholly true, even though it may resonate with some soldiers and others. As the film would put it, if it could talk, “The soldiers are there to fight.” But this is an insufficient answer if we are trying to understand our role in Afghanistan, or even what it means to be a soldier in an unnamed war.

I suspect the writer Sebastian Junger is aware of this shortcoming because he relies heavily on the mission of the film instead of pointing to the film itself. In the words of Junger and Tim Hetherington, co-director of the film, “This is an entirely experiential film: the cameras never leave the valley; there are no interviews with generals or diplomats. The only goal is to make viewers feel as if they have just been through a 90-minute deployment.” Fair enough. Junger repeated this phrase during the Q and A that I attended at Silverdocs.

Restrepo filmmakers Sebastian Junger (l.) and Tim Hetherington (r.) at Outpost Restrepo. Korengal Valley, Afghanistan, Kunar Province. 2007.
Photograph © Tim Hetherington

At this point in their written manifesto—believable, though suspiciously defensive—I am with them. They made the film that they intended to make. Ok. But the next two lines throw the whole idea into the realm of the unreal. They write, “This is war, full stop. The conclusions are up to you.”

In fact, the conclusions are not up to me. They are spelled out in a narrow and fully predictable depiction of war in Afghanistan. When you make up the rules of the game, you can define them so that you win. And this is what the filmmakers attempted with Restrepo. The deliberate exclusion of facts other than “experience” gives Restrepo the opportunity to become, as one enthusiastic reviewer from Movieline put it, “as viscerally exciting as Hurt Locker.” And it is. It’s a lot like Hurt Locker. And I liked it for that reason.

Junger spoke eloquently about the power of brotherhood that he feels provides a strong pull for soldiers to return to the theater of war. And maybe this concept could have deepened the film’s message. The trouble is that this notion of brotherhood is absent from the film. Instead, we are treated to a visual portrayal of interactions between soldiers. It’s not that the feeling of brotherhood was missing in actual fact—who am I to say if it was or was not. Rather, it’s that the film failed to capture the brotherhood as Junger describes it.

Did I like Restrepo? Yes, I did. But I’m fairly certain it’s because of the shooting and the yelling and the emotion, not because it shows the truth about war.

Which brings me back to little five-year-old McKinley Nolan getting water at the well in rural Texas. I can almost hear someone call out his name, “McKinley!” Here’s a boy who would, too soon, become a man and a soldier in war. As his brother Michael put it when talking about why McKinley went to war, “He wasn’t perfect, but he did seek what’s right.”

The Nolans are now actively working to have McKinley recognized in some way. He may not be on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial; his life story is probably too complicated for that. But in some way it seems to me that in recognizing McKinley forty years after the fact, we can recognize the ambiguities of the war experience, the unsteady allegiance that soldiers make to a country that expects them to be prepared to give up their lives.

Did any of the soldiers at Restrepo outpost think about deserting or even defecting? We are not told because the topic didn’t come up during conversations at Restrepo outpost or in the subsequent interviews. (Or, if it did, the filmmakers decided not to include it.) What we are sure of is that the soldiers put themselves in harms way. They killed people as they are supposed to do. They killed real enemy fighters who were trying to kill them. In the process, they also hurt women, elderly people and children. Simply put, Restrepo is the reality of war as we are coming to know it. It’s a stunted and factual version of war without the space to find the truth. In this way, it may be a strong depiction of war’s futility, but it’s not the end-all, be-all truthful documentation of it, as much as it appears that way.

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