Betty and Ken are going on tour to screen BRAVO! in a number of locations across the United States.

Here is a schedule—in some cases firm, in some cases tentative—of screenings:

August 9, 2012 at 1:30 PM at the Omni in Irving, TX

August 13, 2012 at 6 PM at Howard Payne University’s Constitution Hall in Brownwood, TX

August 20 and/or 21, 2012 in Memphis, TN (Tentative)

August 31, 2012 at 1:00 PM at the Sheraton in Arlington, VA at the annual Khe Sanh Veterans Reunion. (Tentative)

September 8, 2012 at 3 PM at the Veterans Affairs facility in Boston, MA

If you live in one of these areas and would like to have more information about these screenings, please contact Ken Rodgers at ken@bravotheproject.com. Attendance is by invitation only, so let us hear from you.

We plan to see hot weather and thunderstorms but a cooling trend would be nice as we travel east. We appreciate your efforts on behalf of BRAVO! Thanks for spreading the word and thanks too, for those continuing donations at https://bravotheproject.com/donate/.

In August, as we announced before, Betty and I will be motoring to Washington, DC, via Dallas and Memphis and Shiloh and Chickamauga. While in Washington, we will attend the annual Khe Sanh Veterans reunion. While there, we hope to hold a screening for anyone interested in attending. As of now, we are in the planning stage and our plans for a screening will, in part, depend on who can attend and when.

Whether you have seen BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR or not, if you live in the general area, or are planning to travel to Washington, DC, in late August, please let us know as soon as possible if you are interested in attending and we will extend an invitation to the screening as soon as we have our plans firmed up.

You can reach us at ken@bravotheproject.com or by calling Ken at 208-340-8889 or Betty at 208-340-8324.

Speaking of screenings, we would like to reiterate that we are showing the film in Irving, Texas, on August 9, 2012 to the Vietnam Veterans of America annual leadership conference and in Brownwood, Texas, at the Freedom Academy on August 13. We are also considering a screening in Memphis somewhere around the middle of August. If you live in the vicinity of our travels…Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, western North Carolina, West Virginia or Virginia…and would like to host a screening as a way to help support your local veterans’ organizations, we are open to your ideas.

After the Khe Sanh Veterans’ reunion, we plan to head north into the upper Atlantic states and would also entertain the opportunity to screen the film in Pennsylvania, New York, and points further north.

Still on the docket is a screening of the film in Walla Walla, Washington, in concert with the Department of Veterans Affairs. This is tentatively scheduled for July 17 and 18, 2012.

We will also screen BRAVO! at the Boise VA facility this coming Wednesday evening.

Again, if you have any ideas on putting together a BRAVO! event, please contact us.

Last but not least, this travel to promote BRAVO! and generate interest throughout the US is a costly undertaking. We now have a PayPal link for donations on this website. If you would like to help further our efforts, please consider making a donation today or tell others how they can help. Unless you ask to remain anonymous, we will proudly add your name to our Wall of Supporters on the website. Without the generosity of supporters like you, BRAVO! would have never been completed. Thank you!

Good things are happening with the film, so it is time to post an update on the status of BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR:

The Boise Veterans Affairs facility has invited us back again to screen BRAVO! for their employees on June 20, 2012. At the last screening, many attendees said the film should be required viewing for every VA employee because it helps them better understand Vietnam veterans. Special guest: BRAVO! cinematographer Mark Spear.

We have a tentative showing of BRAVO! scheduled for July 17 and 18, 2012, at the Veterans Affairs facility in Walla Walla, Washington. Special guest: BRAVO! interviewee Ron Rees.

Betty and Ken Rodgers will be motoring to Irving (in the Dallas metropolitan area), Texas, to screen BRAVO! at the Vietnam Veterans of America annual leadership conference on August 9, 2012. In conjunction with the showing, an article about BRAVO! is tentatively scheduled to appear in the VVA’s July-August edition of their national magazine, The VVA Veteran. After Dallas, we will trek to Brownwood, Texas, for a screening organized and hosted by our good friends and supporters, Roger and Mary Green Engle.

After the Brownwood visit, Betty and Ken will motor through the South, visiting Bentonville, Arkansas, to view the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, then on to Shiloh and Chickamauga, Tennessee, to tour the Civil War battlefields there.

After that, they will journey on to Washington, DC, for the annual get-together of Khe Sanh Veterans. The reunion begins during the last week of August.

If you live in the general areas we have mentioned and would like to host a screening of BRAVO!, please contact Ken at ken@kennethrodgers.com. At this point in time, the screenings are not open to the general public, but are private, by invitation only. If you have a favorite veteran’s charity, consider a screening of BRAVO! as a way to help raise some funds for that charity.

BRAVO! is currently entered into film festivals in New Orleans, Boston, Austin, Southern Utah, Hot Springs (in Arkansas), Port Townsend (on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State), Santa Fe, The Hamptons, Iowa City, Toronto and Chicago. If you have any connections or know something about any of these festivals and want to help give us a leg up, please give us a shout.

Last but not least, we ask for your help. We are still exploring the best way to get BRAVO! out to the widest audience. If you know of a major business that might consider sponsoring the film, or if you know a film distributor who would be interested in promoting this “astounding motion picture” (thank you, D. Schwartz) about the Vietnam War and what it means to us today, please contact us immediately.

Mark Spear, film producer, photographer, director, film editor and principal videographer for Bravo!, muses on his experiences helping create the film.

It’s been over a year now since I was given the task of filming interviews of some of the siege of Khe Sanh survivors at an annual reunion in San Antonio, Texas for a documentary titled Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor, Ken and Betty Rodgers’ first film. Ken, a Marine with Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines (B 1/26) who was there for the siege, felt it was time to tell this story…so did Betty. I felt I was up for it and thankfully they trusted me. After all, I’ve been on some pretty important shoots through my career, some seemingly less important, but all I have tried to give my best work to.

If you had met Ken on the street you would probably assume a first impression of an easy-going normal guy which he is, although he joked with me that he isn’t! I admittedly was very humbled by his experience and a bit intimidated by his intelligence. He is not the normal stereotyped Vietnam veteran…now. Ken’s poems and writing enlighten me as well as his ability to tell the story of the siege so matter of factly. Ken also acted like a bridge between me and his fellow Marines we were to interview, more so than I think he knew.

Betty and her knowledge of photography and art was a welcome relief to the pressure I put on myself. She did so much coordinating and calmly complimented me at every turn, giving me strength she did not know I thought I did not have. This made production so smooth and enjoyable.

I knew this was going to be big, the greatest challenge I had ever worked on. Deep down, I admit now, I was terrified! Ken and Betty, using their seed money and a small grant from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, were relying on ME to help give this story a face. Me!…me…(gulp).

Working on a war documentary was something I had dreamed of doing forever it seemed, and now it was really happening. I remember going home after I interviewed Ken and crying in sadness, fear, honor and respect…and for the gravity of the situation. It turns out this particular shoot was something I didn’t prepare for emotionally. I didn’t think I needed to. After all, the siege was history by the time I was born in 1968. I’ve seen plenty of war movies and documentaries, but this was different. Ken was there, and every time I talked with him my mind started to drift in thoughts of what it must have been like.

Mark Spear Shooting Video in San Antonio, Texas

I kept my focus more on the lighting, sound, location, the way one might manipulate an interviewee to get the best “stuff.” The technical preparations paled in comparison to hearing these men, these Marines of Bravo Cmpany, now in their 60’s and 70’s, tell a story about how they survived, as very young men, a war that forever changed them.

I remember sitting behind the camera listening to every one of their words, fighting off the tears my imagination was creating from the pictures they painted. Think of these men as 15 different camera angles on a shoot, all different perspectives and styles. Here are these hardened veterans remembering, reliving, telling their recollection of the Ghost Patrol and Payback, stifling their tears, choking up, needing to take a break from being in that place again.

I realized it was almost therapy for these guys, some of whom had not spoken extensively about these events for 40 years…and now were laying what they could out there. I had to stay on task…not get too caught up in the story…don’t forget my job, I thought…don’t say anything stupid…don’t cry, don’t cry I told myself. I saved that for my first night in my San Antonio hotel room after we filmed the first round of interviews.

It’s as amazing to me now as it was when the stories and production all started unfolding. I look back at this experience as one I will never, ever forget. These Marines who welcomed me into a sacred reunion…their reunion…where I looked into their eyes and saw more than historic facts…I saw men who had the courage to not give up then…and to not give up now, and still fight this battle every day.

Mark Spear in San Antonio, Texas, July, 2010

To the friends I made there, to the Marines of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines (B 1/26), my hat is off to you. This is in the top 3 productions I have had the honor of being a part of in my career…funny thing is, I don’t know what numbers 2 or 3 are! Thank you.

Betty and I arrived in Rochester, MN with anticipation caught up beneath our lungs like gear jammed in a rucksack. What would these men of Bravo Company think about seeing themselves rendered on film like we had seen them…exposed, frightened, defiant, brave and glorious.

We were nervous. Excited. Even a little fearful.  Weather veered from hot and muggy to cool and windy, to rain, to overcast. The strawberry pannenkoeken were delicious, the Minnesota accents like cue balls clicking off the sides of nine balls. The Mayo Clinic loomed gigantic across the street and beckoned people from all over the world; all religions, and colors. The burkas, the kangas, the cowboy boots.

Every time I leave one of these Khe Sanh Veterans’ reunions I say I’ll never go to another. I have nothing in common with the other attendees but for the past experience of sitting in red mud waiting for the next NVA mortar to arrive. Waiting to live or die. Who needs those memories? Not that we don’t deal with thoughts and fears of the gulf between life and death all through our lives. But in our normal lives, life and death’s urgency gets kicked to the back of the six-by while we deal with traffic and bosses and spouses, children, the dog and cat, cleaning the garage. But at Khe Sanh, the conflict between living and dying clutched our throats moment to moment to moment. Like the hot breath of an Indochinese tiger pursuing us down the trail through a bamboo thicket.

We have nothing in common, nothing in common except….

But then the reunion date approaches and I become anxious and begin to remember forty-three years past and I begin to remember the reunion the prior year. Some men die between reunions, and I didn’t get to spend enough time with them. Some men don’t come back to the reunion, something made them angry, an incautious word may have stabbed them like a bayonet. It hurt. Some of us show up as if we are seeking things we lost and cannot find. As summer approaches, I need to move. I am drawn like a chunk of slag to a magnet.

As we showed the latest cut of Bravo! to the interviewees, I felt my heart hammer in my chest. Will they like it? Will they hate it? Will they hate us for exposing them? Did we get the story right?

I think we did. Most said so. Some acted as if we had released over forty years of pent-up rage and fear. Some said very little. Betty and I choose to believe it was a success. We pleased the ones who mattered most.

Later, we showed it again to the greater membership of the Khe Sanh Veterans. I had similar fears, and different ones, too. Would they be angry because we didn’t include them in the movie? Would they find it credible? Again, the response was generous. Men and women had tears in their eyes; they gave hugs of gratitude to Betty and me. Not that some men didn’t have issues. They did, and if they didn’t I would wonder if the movie was really effective.

So now we are back home in Boise, getting laundry done and bags packed for the next leg of Betty and Ken’s fantastic journey. On to Skywalker Ranch, Marin County, CA to do the final sound mix.

I think we are almost finished with the movie. I hope so. I need to get shed of the nightmares this movie inserts into my dreams. Now we just need to get it seen.

Betty and I arrived at the Kahler Grand Hotel this evening. Rochester is choked in a heat wave we hope will break tomorrow. Across the street, the portals to the Mayo Clinic. The Clinic is a major force in this corner of Minnesota, and in medicine, a force in many other places. An interesting anecdote to the Mayo is that both Betty and I have relatives who were founding partners here. For Betty: Augustus Stinchfield, for me: Melvin Millet. The world may be populated by billions of folks, but in some regards the tentacles of the past and the present mingle in our lives in interesting and mysterious ways. Friday morning we show the latest cut of Bravo, Common Men, Uncommon Valor, to the interviewees and guests and donors, and in the afternoon, to other invited Khe Sanh Veterans. Both of us are apprehensive and excited and relieved, all at the same time.

Had dinner with old warrior mates this evening at Victoria’s Ristorante and Wine Bar. A lot of funny yarns about boot camp and early experiences at Khe Sanh.

Tomorrow the weather is supposed to break in a good way. Other mates will show up. The memories good and bad will erupt and things I had forgotten will flash inside my recall. Things I thought I saw will be proven false. Things I thought I saw and then rejected will prove to have happened. Oh, memory. You are a fickle faculty.