Why go back?

Questions always outnumber answers in Vietnam.

So what drew these six Marines here again? Memories of confusion and pain. Powerful days whose impact lasted a lifetime. Friends who left their blood on Vietnam’s green shores.

They will return to Saigon, DaNang, Hue, Khe Sanh, the DMZ, even travel to Hanoi. These are not simply stops on a trip. They are way stations of the heart.

This is Vietnam...a return.

Looking back into their past, a group of Marine brothers finds, like the old schoolyard, it is smaller, its demons sometimes less threatening, always terribly real. Like their time spent "in the barrel," this is a chance to get out of the enemy sights, if they can ever finally know who and where the enemy is…in Vietnam.

Two veterans hug on top of an emerald ridgeline at the DMZ on their own personal battlefield. It has changed.

A Marine reaches out to touch the hand of a former North Vietnamese soldier. He is smiling.

A young man kneels on Vietnam’s soft, green earth, the place of his father’s fiery helicopter crash. Half a world away the boy feels close to a man he never knew.

What is the past? How powerful is its draw? How difficult it is to be stranded in this old experience…and how powerful to let go?

The answers are surprising, unvarnished, terrible, reconciling.

What peace can still be pulled from this war? How can these veterans shed light on the mystery that is always Vietnam? Questions raised in the words of Vietnam’s combat veterans.

Six Marines describe the brutality, confusion, adrenaline and scars of combat in VIETNAM, Time In The Barrel, a one-hour film.