Unfinished Symphony: Democracy and Dissent

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, many Americans were sharply divided on the issue of United States participation in the Vietnam War, and this documentary takes an impressionistic look at the turmoil surrounding this period, with a special emphasis placed on one little-remembered protest. In 1971, a group of Vietnam veterans who had come to oppose the war staged what they called “Operation POW,” a march that retraced the path of Paul Revere’s famous “Midnight Ride” during the American Revolution in an effort to demonstrate that the war was opposed not merely by students and radicals, but by many of the men who had actually fought, and that the right to protest was one of the freedoms they were supposedly fighting to protect. The protest received a great deal of press attention in New England, much of it favorable, but beyond the arrest of a number of marchers who attempted to set up camp at a former Minutemen’s post, it failed to attract much national coverage. Unfinished Symphony: Democracy and Dissent looks at Operation POW and its aftermath, as well as the legacy of the Vietnam War; the film’s directors, Bestor Cram and Mike Majoros, were both members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and participants in the march.