Film has power and lots of soul

When I first arrived in Vietnam, during the latter half of October 1968, I one day was assigned to guard detail. Another soldier and I were ordered to accompany our company pay officer as he traveled throughout the country, visiting all our outports, to pay the soldiers.

Historical note: In those days, at least, we soldiers got paid in cash (which we called monopoly money, since it was brightly colored military payment certificates instead of greenbacks). So the officer left our headquarters in Vung Tau and traveled north, all the way to Qui Nhon, hitting Cam Ranh and several other spots along the way.

My job was to act as armed guard. And so I was equipped with a sidearm (a .45 automatic), a rifle (an M-16) and, for added protection, an M-79 grenade launcher. My partner, a black guy from – if I recall correctly – the San Francisco Bay Area, was similarly armed, minus the M-79.

I mention my partner’s color for a reason. This was 1968, and it was the midst of the mid-century awakening of black America. I remember being so impressed as my partner greeted all his friends – and he had a lot of them – with what then was called the black-power salute: a kind of clenched-fist extension of your arm, similar to what Tiger Woods (and, now, many of the younger professional golfers) does on the golf course, though with the palm facing out.

It was infectious. My partner and his friends would, often without speaking, salute each other, and I found myself envying their sense of unity. I had felt nothing like that since giving up football my senior year of high school – and even that paled by comparison.

That part of my life came back to me earlier today as I sat through the documentary “Soul Power, ” a study of the three-day music festival that was planned to accompany the 1974 heavyweight championship fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali.

This film, put together by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte – an editor of “When We Were Kings,” Leon Gast’s Oscar-winning 1996 documentary – is a compilation of footage taken during the shooting of “Kings” (Gast and his crews are even shown at one point filming the action).

And it is two films in one: First, it shows the backdrop of the concert itself, which became a separate event when a Foreman injury postponed the fight for six weeks. This complicated an already complex arrangement involving dozens of musicians, including some of the biggest names of the day – James Brown, B.B. King, Bill Withers, Miriam Makeba and more.

Second, it shows ample concert footage, from King’s performance of his classic blues number “The Thrill Is Gone” to Makeba’s “click song” and Brown living up to his nickname of “The Godfather of Soul.”

Of the two aspects of the film, the second is better for music enthusiasts. Not only does the film show contemporary audiences a still-vital Brown, even though by then he was past his prime, it gives us the music of Latin star Celia Cruz long before “The Buena Vista Social Club” would introduce her to many modern music fans.

But it’s the first aspect of the film that most moved me, mainly because part of the concert’s setup involved personalities such as Ali describing, and acting out, the rising energy of Black America. Sitting there, listening to a lean and mean Ali rapping about the damage that centuries of prejudice had done to black Americans, it was hard not to think of my partner – a man who became my friend – in Vietnam.

Hours later, I’m still sitting here, thinking of him. And I’m still tapping my foot to the rhythms of JB’s soulful tunes.