Entertainment

‘ASSIGNMENT HANOI:’ HAUNTING TRIP BACK TO THE BATTLEFIELD WITH AN OLIVE BRANCH

“Pete Peterson:Assignment Hanoi” Tonight at 10 on WNET/Ch.13

AN hour is not nearly enough time to follow all the storylines that cross in “Pete Peterson: Assignment Hanoi.”

Peterson’s is a life story dominated by the war that proved as unwinnable as it was unpopular.

He bombed Vietnam as an Air Force officer. He was tortured by the North Vietnamese during 6 years as a POW. And now, after stints in business and Congress, he is back in Vietnam as this country’s ambassador, where he has become “a walking billboard for reconciliation,” on and off the job.

In between those biographical points lies a wealth of material rich in meaning not just to a profile of Peterson but to anyone whose life was touched or marked by the war.

Sandy Northrop, a documentary filmmaker now living in Hanoi, whets more interests than she can satisfy in the time allotted to “Assignment Hanoi,” for which she was producer, director, editor and cinematographer.

She follows Peterson while he catches up with American and Vietnamese war vets together toward Ho Chi Minh City; while he takes meetings with his embassy staff or revisits the rice paddy near which he was shot down and captured; while he plants a banyan tree in a “peace park.”

Or while he pleads with a congressional committee to look at Vietnam not as a war but as a country of some 80 million people, more than half of whom are younger than 25 and have cell phones, two jobs and dreams of upward mobility but no memory of what is called “the American war.”

Along the way, Northrop takes sidetrips into lives and stories that parallel and intersect with Peterson’s in this country where one of the most-watched TV programs broadcasts weekly pleas for help in finding Vietnamese MIAs.

We meet Phan Kim Hy, who finally could no longer afford to search for her son and, so, buried vials of dirt gathered over 20 years from numerous unmarked graves in a spot she designated in a military cemetery outside Hanoi.

At every point of Northrup’s journey with Peterson and those she met along the way, we want to linger.