Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

In April 2007 I visited Norwich University as part of the Colby Military Writers’ Symposium. While there I heard talk about a student-made documentary about Vermont soldiers who had been killed in the Iraq War, and one morning I passed an auditorium in which the film was being shown. I was on my way to a give a presentation and couldn’t stop, but I could see that within the auditorium it was standing room only. The students were as still as stones. Norwich is still mainly a military academy, most of the students were ROTC cadets, and some of them had already been deployed as members of their reserve units. A few had the Purple Heart.

A few weeks after I returned to Ohio, the president of the university sent all symposium participants a DVD of Vermont Fallen. I set it aside and never watched it until tonight, I guess because it was Memorial Day. It consists mainly of interviews with the families of the fallen, who plainly trust the student film makers and talk about their loved ones with quiet dignity, honesty, sometimes humor, and always deep sadness. Many cried. I couldn’t watch the film for more than a few minutes without tears, and midway through something gave way inside me and I just plain bawled.

I figured the film would be online and I was right. So here are five chapters from Vermont Fallen, preceded by an excerpt from a Norwich University press release that explains its genesis.

In December of 2005, Professor Bill Estill read an article that identified Vermont as the state with the highest per capita loss of soldiers from the Iraq war. That was when the idea hit him.

Estill approached students in his television production classes with the idea to make a documentary that would serve as a memorial to those fallen soldiers. The film would celebrate the lives of these Vermonters, through interviews with the friends and family members they left behind. . .

For the next two semesters they crisscrossed the state conducting some seventy-five interviews and compiling nearly fifty hours of video footage. The result is Vermont Fallen, a powerful film that takes viewers into the living rooms and kitchens of families suffering tremendous personal losses, offering a rare glimpse at the depth of their grief.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

The complete film is here.