In the spring of 1968, six young Black soldiers were preparing to go to Vietnam when the country seemed to be coming apart around them. Ed Emanuel, Thad Givens, Lawton Mackey Jr., Willie Brown, John Willis and Norman Reid were in basic training when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Two months later, while flying to Vietnam, they learned that Robert F. Kennedy had been killed. Soon they would become Team 2/6 of Company F, 51st Infantry, a six-man Army long-range reconnaissance patrol that became known as the “Soul Patrol.” Nearly six decades later, their story is headed to movie theaters.
Director J.M. Harper’s documentary Soul Patrol follows the men who served on Team 2/6, the first all-Black U.S. special operations team to serve in Vietnam. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where Harper won the Directing Award in the U.S. Documentary Competition. Kino Lorber acquired North American distribution rights in May and plans an awards-season theatrical release this fall. The film made another stop Saturday at the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival, where an Aug. 8 screening was followed by a discussion with Harper, former Secretary of State and Vietnam veteran John Kerry and Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.
