Ghosts of the 7th Cavalry deals with some of the darkest chapters in American military history: episodes of atrocity and tragedy from the 1870s frontier to Vietnam.
This singular film is the story of one man and one unit. The man is Major Robert ‘Snuffy’ Gray, one of America’s most distinguished war veterans, who fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, and who at 83 began a journey across his homeland to meet old comrades and unburden his soul.
His beloved unit is the celebrated but controversial US 7th cavalry regiment. The story of the 7th encompasses the horror and heroism of America’s own experience of armed conflict.
This was the regiment at the forefront of the war against the native Americans of the western plains, notably the Lakota Sioux. Led by General Custer, it met disaster at the Little Bighorn in 1876 – a brief reprieve in indigenous dispossession. Fourteen years later, the 7th massacred civilians at the ‘battle’ of Wounded Knee, the last chapter in America’s frontier wars.
In the 20th century it did more than its share of tough fighting in the Pacific, Korea and Vietnam. But this record was marred, notably, by implication in the massacre of civilians at No Gun Ri in Korea.
Old Snuffy Gray’s tale is complex: much of his sense of guilt relates to the betrayal of the Hmong tribal allies he helped recruit in Indochina. But as this film traces his twilight journey across America, his ambivalence about his unit’s deeper history – the carnage of the 19th century American west – becomes apparent.
He talks to current-day 7th veterans who happen to be native Americans, and their feelings are even more mixed. Yet, strange as it may seem to an outsider, there is ultimately reconciliation here. Snuffy and his native American comrades find peace with their history.
This becomes clear when they join an annual Lakota ceremony to commemorate the defeat of Custer and his men. The most revered symbol in this ritual is today’s Stars and Stripes.
In America, units like the 7th cavalry fought in the vicious campaigns of European settlement, and have existed continuously since. In some strange way, this may have helped native Americans maintain a pride in their warrior culture, a pride all Americans these days want a piece of.
After all, the modern US military celebrates the very traditions its forebears destroyed: thus Apache helicopters, Tomahawk missiles.
