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In 1968, on her 24th birthday, Barbara Sonneborn received word that her husband, Jeff, had been killed in Vietnam while trying to rescue his wounded radio operator during a mortar attack. "We regret to inform," the telegram began. Twenty years later, Sonneborn, a photographer and visual artist, embarked on a journey in search of the truth about war and its legacy, eloquently chronicled in her debut documentary, Regret to Inform.
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Framing the film as an odyssey through Vietnam to Que Son, where Jeff was killed, Sonneborn weaves together the stories of widows from both sides of the American-Vietnam war. The result is a profoundly moving examination of the impact of war over time. The film is "so exquisitely filmed, edited and scored, it is the documentary equivalent of a tragic epic poem," writes The New York Times. "Every word and image quivers with an anguished resonance." The film received an Academy Award® nomination for Best Documentary Feature, won a George Foster Peabody Award, and won the Best Director and Best Cinematography documentary awards at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival.
In 1988, at the time Ms. Sonneborn began this project, she had met only one other American war widow. Despite the support groups that existed for Vietnam veterans, she was unaware of any
support network for the wives left behind. Propelled by her desire to find other women who had experienced the same loss on all sides of the war, and to understand what could be learned about war through their stories, Ms. Sonneborn put together a production team in 1990 and sent out several thousand letters searching for widows, first in the U.S. The women were difficult to find; unlike World War II, where widows and veterans were honored and respected, during the Vietnam War they were often castigated. With the help of many Vietnam War veterans, the press, and other survivors as she found them, Ms. Sonneborn talked with more than 200 American widows during pre-production for the film. "Many of these widows — as well as the veterans and children of soldiers killed in the war — shared their experiences in ways they couldn't before," she says. "I was overwhelmed by how the suffering from the war continued. As one widow, whose husband died after the war from the effects of Agent Orange told me, 'It's not like the war is here and then it's over. It starts when it ends.'"
In 1992, Sonneborn traveled to Vietnam, accompanied by Nguyen Ngoc Xuan, a South Vietnamese woman whose first husband was killed in the war fighting for South Vietnam. Xuan later married an American soldier and moved to the U.S. in the early 70's. She agreed to serve as Sonneborn's translator on the trip and to share her own story in the film. On their journey through Vietnam — where more than 3 million people were killed during the war — they found women everywhere who wanted to be interviewed. "They were quite surprised and very moved that an American widow wanted to hear their stories," Sonneborn recalls. "The women recounted in painful detail the human and environmental damage caused by what they call 'the American war' in Vietnam." One woman in the film describes, "The cruelty we experienced was longer than a river, higher than a mountain, deeper than an ocean." Another adds, "If you weren't dead, you weren't safe."
With heartbreaking candor, the women describe the struggles to put their lives back together in the wake of war. An American woman remembers receiving a letter from her husband after being told of his death. "I thought, well, maybe he's not dead! Oh, they made a mistake — you know, this is the proof. Then I read the date on it and I realized." For many widows, the war followed the soldiers home. One woman tells how her husband returned safely from the war, but went out to the garage one day and shot himself. "I love you sweetheart," he wrote in a suicide note, "but I just can't take the flashbacks anymore." As these women bear witness, they transform their private sorrows into a collective acknowledgement that the price of war can be measured in many ways, but it is always too great. Says Nguyen Ngoc Xuan, "In Vietnam, my neighbor's husband die, my neighbor's son die, too. Sometimes you ashamed to cry, because what make my pain greater than my neighbor's?"
In Regret to Inform, widows from both sides speak out, putting a human face on the all-too-often overlooked casualties of armed conflict: the survivors. Intercut with beautiful scenes of the serene Vietnamese countryside and shocking archival footage from the war years, the women's voices form an eloquent international chorus calling for peace. Regret to Inform is a powerful meditation on loss and the devastation of all war on a personal level. It is a love story, and a deeply moving exploration of the healing power of compassion.
"Making this film has been Jeff's gift to me," Sonneborn sums up. "It has expanded my understanding of sorrow and suffering, of love and joy. I want people to see war differently than they've seen it before. I want them to look war in the face, to ask themselves, 'Am I going to allow this to happen ever again?' I want people to so deeply realize the humanity of other human beings that they won't be able to kill them."
(2000, 60 min.)
Visit the special Regret to Inform POV Website on PBS »
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Barbara Sonneborn has worked as a visual artist since 1973. Primarily a photographer, she has done set design, installation, and a children's book. Her photographs have been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, many galleries, a one-person show in New York, and are included in many private and museum collections. 
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