Dear America - Letters Home from Vietnam (1987)
HBO

Description

This classic HBO documentary features reenactments of actual letters written by soldiers during the Vietnam war. In each case, a famous celebrity voice (Martin Sheen, Michael J. Fox, Robin Williams, and others) reads the letters to us.

Tags

1970s, Vietnam War

Collected reviews and ratings

10 Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

There have been many great movies about Vietnam. This is the one that completes the story. It has no plot except that thousands of young men went to a faraway country and had unspeakable experiences there, and many of them died or were wounded for life in body or soul.
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10 Washington Post | Hal Hinson

There's a purity in the approach these filmmakers have taken, and its effect is to create in us a feeling that we are experiencing these events from the closest possible vantage point. The result is thrilling, powerful.
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10 Amazon user reviews

The most moving part of the show was the last letter, from a mom to her son who had died 15 years earlier in Vietnam. That letter is a real tear-jerker. Overall, an excellent documentary, one of the better ones of its era.
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8.3 Time Out

This beautifully crafted documentary brings home the tragedy of the Vietnam war in ways well out of the reach of feature films.
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7.5 TV Guide

While some of the archival footage is haunting, as documentaries go Dear America offers little that deviates from the popular history of US involvement in southeast Asia; the only surprise is that the too-brief narrative skips over the 1975 fall of Saigon and only hints at the years of public silence and derision that greeted returned Vietnam vets.
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