Vietnam’s First All-Black Special Ops Team Documentary

In the spring of 1968, six young Black soldiers were preparing to go to Vietnam when the country seemed to be coming apart around them. Ed Emanuel, Thad Givens, Lawton Mackey Jr., Willie Brown, John Willis and Norman Reid were in basic training when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

Two months later, while flying to Vietnam, they learned that Robert F. Kennedy had been killed. Soon they would become Team 2/6 of Company F, 51st Infantry, a six-man Army long-range reconnaissance patrol that became known as the “Soul Patrol.”

Nearly six decades later, their story is headed to movie theaters.

Director J.M. Harper’s documentary Soul Patrol follows the men who served on Team 2/6, the first all-Black U.S. special operations team to serve in Vietnam. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where Harper won the Directing Award in the U.S. Documentary Competition. Kino Lorber acquired North American distribution rights in May and plans an awards-season theatrical release this fall.

The film made another stop Saturday at the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival, where an Aug. 8 screening was followed by a discussion with Harper, former Secretary of State and Vietnam veteran John Kerry and Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Six Men Sent Ahead of Everyone Else

The term “special operations” needs some context when applied to Team 2/6.

The soldiers were not Green Berets, and the military did not organize special operations forces in 1968 exactly as it does today. Team 2/6 was part of Company F (Long Range Patrol), 51st Infantry, under II Field Force Vietnam. Army histories classify the organization as a long-range patrol unit, commonly referred to by the acronym LRP or the older LRRP, for long-range reconnaissance patrol.

Their job put very small teams well ahead of conventional forces.

Army doctrine built LRRP units around five- or six-man patrols that could move quietly through enemy-controlled territory, collect intelligence and report what they saw. Direct offensive combat was generally discouraged except in self-defense, although what actually happened in Vietnam was often messier than the doctrine.

Company F was stationed at Bien Hoa and occasionally operated around Cu Chi and Phuoc Vinh. Its principal mission was gathering intelligence needed to protect the region around Saigon. Veterans interviewed for an Army historical study described operations that also included ambushes and attacks supported by artillery, aircraft and helicopter gunships.

The company had considerable firepower waiting behind its patrols. Its six-man teams could be inserted and extracted by dedicated helicopters, with gunships, a quick-reaction force and other support available when things went wrong. Team 2/6 was one of those patrols, and the six-man structure became central to how the veterans later discussed their experience.

During an Aug. 8 Q&A following a screening of Soul Patrol at the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival, Harper recalled his first phone conversation with Emanuel. The veteran asked him a question that sounded simple: “Do you understand what a team is?”

Harper told him he did.

“I did not understand,” Harper said. “It took me about four years to understand that if the team survived, that was the point.”

Emanuel later wrote about the experience in his 2003 memoir, Soul Patrol: The Riveting True Story of the First African American LRRP Team in Vietnam. That book eventually found its way to Harper, which in turn inspired his documentary.

The Soldiers Filmed Their Own War

Harper’s interest in Black troops in Vietnam began years before he found Emanuel’s memoir.

He told the Martha’s Vineyard audience that as a teenager he came across a large book about the Vietnam War at Barnes & Noble. What stuck with him were photographs of Black soldiers carrying M60s, M16s and M79 grenade launchers while wearing helmets marked with peace signs and references to the Black Panther movement.

Those contradictions sent him looking for more stories about Black Vietnam veterans. Eventually, he read Emanuel’s book and called him.

Harper, whose father served in the Navy, said he had grown up fascinated by the Hollywood version of war and at one point considered enlisting himself. Over time, he came to see his role differently.

“My job was to listen faithfully,” Harper said, adding that listening was something many Vietnam veterans did not receive when they returned home.

That became especially important with Soul Patrol. Harper said the men had spent decades watching movies about Vietnam and “never, and I mean never, felt that their story had been told accurately.”

Emanuel kept giving the filmmaker the same instruction throughout the six-year production: “Tell the truth.”

The veterans had also left behind something unusual: moving images of their own war.

Members of Team 2/6 shot Super 8 film while they were overseas, recording themselves as teenagers and young men living through experiences they could not have known would still follow them decades later. Harper combines those films with photographs, interviews and dramatic recreations.

Harper told Sundance that the footage reminded him of the way young people now document their lives with phones. Some members of the patrol were only 18 or 19 when those images were recorded.

The film follows them long after the cameras stopped rolling. Harper said some scenes dealing with post-traumatic stress came directly from years of conversations with the veterans. He recalled Emanuel describing an episode in a grocery store when an ordinary exchange with a cashier triggered intense anger. Thad Givens told Harper that if a checkout line became crowded while he was shopping, he sometimes left a full basket behind and walked out.

Harper deliberately chose not to use the term PTSD in the documentary. He wanted the audience to see what it could look like in ordinary life when memories of Vietnam suddenly intruded on a grocery store, restaurant or other everyday setting.

For the veterans, Harper said, “the past and the present are one.”

Some of the men connected to the story died before the reunion at the center of Soul Patrol could be filmed. Others have died since production began.

“The window for their voices doesn’t stay open forever,” Harper previously told Sundance.

A War Overseas and Upheaval at Home

The timing of Team 2/6’s service also gives Soul Patrol another story to tell.

Black troops bore a disproportionate share of the fighting and deaths early in the war. In 1965, African Americans suffered 24% of the Army’s fatal casualties in Vietnam, according to the Library of Congress, while making up about 12% of the U.S. population. Team 2/6 entered that environment in 1968, one of the most violent years of both the war and the civil rights era.

King was killed April 4 while the six soldiers were still training. Kennedy was shot June 5 after winning California’s Democratic presidential primary and died the following day. The men learned about his death as they were deploying to Vietnam.

Then they arrived in a country still reeling from the Tet Offensive and began going into the field as part of a unit built to find enemy forces before larger American formations encountered them.

Kerry, who commanded Navy swift boats in Vietnam, said after Saturday’s screening that he had worked around LRRP and SEAL teams during the war and understood the danger of sending a handful of men into the field for days at a time.

“You could feel that jungle,” Kerry said. “You could feel the silence and the noise. The noise one footstep could make.”

He also remembered the abruptness of coming home. Kerry described the relief aboard the aircraft carrying troops away from Vietnam, including passengers applauding as the plane took off. Then they landed in the United States.

“You can’t wait to get home,” Kerry said. “But you get there and there was nothing.”

Few people understood what returning veterans had experienced, he said, while public anger over the war further complicated their reception.

Harper’s film moves between that American history and what happened inside the patrol. Its reunion sequences deal with what the men remember, what they avoided talking about after coming home and what remained with them long after Vietnam.

At Sundance, the jury praised Harper’s handling of archival material and reenactments and awarded him the festival’s U.S. documentary directing prize.

Kino Lorber plans to put the film before a wider audience later this year. The distributor said Soul Patrol will receive a theatrical release during awards season, followed by digital, educational and home-video releases. The company has not yet announced specific theaters or dates.

For Emanuel, the theatrical release marks the latest step in a much longer effort to get Team 2/6’s story before a wider audience.

Harper said Emanuel spent decades trying to interest filmmakers and producers in the story of Team 2/6 before Soul Patrol finally came together. His memoir appeared in 2003. The documentary reached Sundance 23 years later.

At the end of Saturday’s Q&A, moderator Henry Louis Gates Jr. asked Harper what responsibility he felt asking veterans to reopen memories that silence may have helped them survive.

Harper answered with something Emanuel had told him.

“Don’t tell any of these guys thank you for your service,” Harper recalled. “Tell them welcome home.”