Sundance Doc ‘Soul Patrol’ Filmmakers the Importance of Black Stories

Ed Emmanuel is on a mission.

The former Vietnam veteran and filmmaker told some of his story in his 2003 memoir “Soul Patrol: The Riveting True Story of the First African American LRRP Team in Vietnam.” Ever since then he tried to film the documentary, but it never got told. Until filmmaker Jason “JM” Harper stepped in, and their film “Soul Patrol premiered Sunday night at the Sundance Film Festival.

“I was left alive in Vietnam and able to come home and tell this story,” Emmanuel says. “My whole existence in Vietnam was me getting back home to tell the story about these brave Black men.”

Through Super 8 film, archival footage and talking heads, “Soul Patrol” doesn’t just reunite some of the Vietnam War’s first Black special operations team as they tell their story; it examines what it was like for these “soul brothers” to be fighting one of the most important wars in history. The documentary also looks at how even through this reunion, the trauma of war still exists for Emmanuel and his team.

Ahead of the film’s premiere, Variety sat down with Emmanuel and Harper along with journalist Jesse Lewis who talks about the erasure of Black soldiers.

Jason, where did the story of “Soul Patrol” begin for you?

Jason Harper: I picked up a book called “Nam, the Vietnam Experience.” I saw it on a bookshelf in Barnes and Noble when I was about 14 years old, and from that moment, I just became obsessed with that war. I saw teenagers who looked exactly like me. They were Black, they they were carrying machine guns, they had bandoliers of ammo, they were walking through the jungle, and on their helmets they had Black Power symbols, Black Panther symbols, or peace symbols. I began to sense that there was, there was a conflict between what they were doing and what they were saying on their helmets. So I just I read everything and I watched everything I could. Years later that I picked up “Soul Patrol” and I read Ed’s story, and that changed my life.

Ed, you’ve been trying to get this documentary made for years, what does it mean to have it out now, especially at this pivotal time in American history?

Ed Emmanuel: I had been working on the film for years, flying back and forth to the East Coast, getting interviews and finding everyone. Our group met in Washington D.C. and so that’s when I first start filming the documentary. I let Jason know where we were and in the progress of getting the documentary filmed and, Jason told me that he was born to do this story. That struck me. You can’t make those kind of statements and not have some validity to back it up. The more that I met with Jason, the more I was convinced I had to take them under my wing and and give them the full and complete story about Soul Patrol.

And Jesse, what does this story mean for you?

Jesse Lewis: It was very humbling for me. But it also says a lot about state of American journalism at the time. I was hired at the Washington Post in 1962 as a copy boy. When I was interviewed, I was asked, “What are your career hopes?” I said, “Well, I’d like to be a foreign correspondent.” I was told by the person who hired me “That’s just never going to happen… If we hire you, we want you to cover, what was then becoming, the Civil Rights Movement.” Well, lo and behold, the war in Vietnam got into full swing. Blacks were fighting, dying and being wounded at a higher rate.

I focused on the Black GI, and that drew the resentment of my white colleagues. No one had written about the Black GI as a phenomenon. So I continued to do that and continue to earn the the disdain of my white colleagues guys from the New York Times and Associated Press. I was the only Black correspondent there.

I was there for four or five months, and I wrote a story at the end of my time there. The story ran in 1967 all on the front page, and they scrambled to reproduce like hell it. The New York Times sent out a Black reporter, Tom Johnson. Time Magazine sent out Wallace Terry, and they did great jobs, but they were playing catch up. I earned the trust of the American military having been in the military myself. I didn’t write any opinion pieces. I wrote about what was happening on the ground. So I was translating into words, very pungent words, very descriptive words, the blood and guts that I saw on the battlefield.

Jason, in your collaboration, with Ed, what were some important touch points for you to get across?

Harper: Ed had gone around doing interviews for some years with the guys who he had fought with, many of whom had passed by the time I started. So he had this massive archive of sit down interviews with other veterans from the Company F, 51st Infantry Regiment. When I put together the reunion to bring together the Soul Patrol team, we knew it was so timely. Mackey had bought his tuxedo. He was ready to come to the interview. He was so excited. Then he passed two weeks before the reunion happened. It was extremely timely in that way, but I was able to use some of the material that I had shot of Mackey. At the reunion, we sat everyone down in a roundtable so we have this communal storytelling, and the guys remembering things from each other as they are telling the story of that year long tour. On top of that, one of the gentlemen who came to the reunion, Willie Brown, he asked us if we’d be interested in this Super 8 film reels that he had shot while they were on tour.

These guys were using Super 8 cameras. As I was editing it, that that stood out to me, that they were just recording themselves in between the battles, at the base, and you just saw them as teenagers, and that that was incredible because you don’t get to see that side of their lives from that time. It was remarkable to have that archive at our fingertips.

Between the archival footage and roundtable and interviews, how did you get on with the editing process of telling all these stories?

Harper: Niles Howard was able to help create that visual language. How do you travel back and forth in time in a kind of seamless way? It was just this monumental challenge, and I knew the edit had to be virtuosic to be able to travel back and forth through time and not get lost, because it’s a journey that traverses 50 years.

There’s a quote at the end that we need to look at where we come from and where we’re headed. What does it mean to be releasing this story in today’s America as we’re seeing people trying to erase history?

Harper: When you have the Department of the Interior literally erasing evidence of any Black historical impact when you have these massive characters in our life, people like Martin Luther King and to have some of our leading Black voices erased from our National Parks and cemeteries, it infuriates me. I feel an incredible weight and responsibility to speak up and to tell Black stories at a time where the administration has a deliberate and considered effort to stamp those voices out in the name of whatever. Black stories are important, now more than ever because it’s an existential crisis, in my opinion. I see that not just in the telling of this story, but in the way that documentaries are financed. You can see in real time the chilling effect that is being institutionalized right now. While we were filming, we lost two of the guys, and they won’t be able to speak for themselves from the grave, and so it’s incredibly important to get a record of what happened so that we can carry that message forward.

Emmanuel: That’s exactly why I wrote the book. I knew that they were going to erase us from history. I had to get this book out. My whole existence in Vietnam was me getting back home to tell the story about these brave Black men out here who will never get ink on what they did in Vietnam.

This interview has been edited and condensed.