‘Soul Patrol’: J.M. Harper On Exploring The Complex Legacy Of The First All-Black U.S. Special Ops Team In Vietnam

After J.M. Harper won the U.S. Documentary Directing Award at Sundance with Soul Patrol, he packed his bags and hit the road, screening the film and discussing its ideas with audiences across the country.

“We’ve been getting an enormous range of responses,” Harper says of the feedback. “A mixture of disbelief, pride, sorrow, and joy that these guys are able to tell their story.”

Almost a year on the circuit, Soul Patrol is finally rolling out in theatres. The film opened on November 6 in the U.S. via Kino Lorber and begins its international rollout on November 13 at DocHouse in London, where Harper and his longtime producer, Sam Bisbee, have been posted up this month previewing the film for UK audiences.

Constructed using a unique mix of never-before-seen moving and still archival images, contemporary interviews, and inventive reenactments, Soul Patrol profiles a group of military vets who served on Team 2/6, the first all-Black U.S. special operations unit in Vietnam.

Opening on the war’s 50th anniversary, the doc captures the surviving members as they reunite in a hotel conference room and recount their shared history. As they reflect on their experiences, the film interrogates the contradictions of fighting for freedom abroad while facing inequality at home.

At the heart of the film is Soul Patrol: The Riveting True Story of the First African American LRRP Team in Vietnam, a little-known memoir that Ed Emanuel, who served in the group, published in 2003.

“I came across Ed’s book, picked up the phone and called him,” Harper explains. “That started a six-year journey of just earning his trust,” Harper says, and it didn’t come easy. The veteran initially turned down his proposal.

“I thought I was going to adapt a chapter of the book. That’s all I wanted to do. And he made it very clear that he wasn’t interested in doing that,” Harper explains. “It had to be all or nothing, and all in his mind was a 10-part, $80 million series. He felt the story was so huge.”

Still, Harper and Emanuel continued to talk. They scheduled a weekly call every Friday to debate ideas.

“The book is basically a play-by-play of the tour from day one to the day he came home. But there was so much more from before that isn’t in the book,” Harper says. “How did you get there? Why did you fight? What happened when you got there, and what about this big lie of why you went? How did you reckon with that? None of that is in the book. So we had a standing call every Friday. We would talk for 2 to 3 hours, and that was when the stories would come out.”

Slowly, over time, the narrative for Soul Patrol the film began to develop, and Emanuel was locked in.

The bulk of the film revolves around the roundtable reunion, which Harper shot at a South Carolina hotel. He says the vets jokingly described the meeting as “the last one.”

“The guys were passing away, and the story was disappearing with them,” Harper says. “We lost [Lawton] Mackey two weeks before the reunion. He’d bought his tuxedo and was so excited to go, and then he died.”

Harper says the biological realities pushed him and his producers to work quickly and get the production moving.

“We put together a lot of grant money, and a lot of partners came on board as soon as they heard the story,” he says.

The film has a roster of financial backers and partners. Producers alongside Harper and Bisbee are Danielle Massie, Peter Bittenbender, and the legendary rapper Nasir Jones. The executive producers are Emanuel, Joe Plummer, Jenifer Westphal, Stacey Reiss, Lance Acord, Jackie Kelman Bisbee, Cody Ryder, Wendy Neu, Jenny Raskin, Kelsey Koenig, Lauren & John Driscoll, Geralyn White Dreyfous, Davis Guggenheim, Rahdi Taylor, Andrew Gertler, Max Allman, Ted Haddock, and Nina & David Fialkow.

The film also had the complete cooperation of all the living Team 2/6 vets, Emanuel, Thad Givens, Lawton Mackey, Jr., Willie Brown, John Willis, and Norman Reid, who participated and helped to shape the production.

“At the reunion, Willie Brown, one of the guys, came up and said, I have some Super 8 from the time. Would you be interested in that? I said, Yeah, Willie, I’d be interested in that,” Harper recalls. “He gave us 45 minutes of footage.”

Harper says almost all of the Super 8 footage in the film was “shot by the guys,” most of whom were still teenagers in Vietnam. The wider U.S. Army was deeply segregated at the time, and so was much of the country back home. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were both murdered just as the young men were making their deployment. Very little had improved by the time they returned home, which naturally begs the question: Why would these young men risk their lives abroad for a country that denied them full citizenship at home? This contradiction is one of the film’s central tensions, and Harper offers no easy resolutions.

“Black people in the U.S. and around the world have different relationships with what it means to be patriotic,” Harper explains. “Sometimes that means speaking out against what politicians or the U.S. military are doing, as we see today. Sometimes it means going to fight, like the Airborne did when they parachuted into France to push the Nazis out. Ultimately, that was the legacy these guys had bought into, regardless of why they joined.”

Soul Patrol is Harper’s second feature. His debut, As We Speak, screened at Sundance in 2024. He has also edited four features, including Coodie & Chike’s Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy. Kino Lorber has the film on a wide release across the U.S., but the story isn’t over, according to Emanuel, who still has ambitions of telling a wider story of the conflict.

“He believes the scale of it is epic—and it is,” Harper says. “When I took that first phone call, I didn’t know it would be six years until we released the film, so I committed to Ed that I would continue to tell his story.”

Harper adds: “Maybe I’ll be talking to you in another 10 years, and we’ll get it done. But I know one thing: I never bet against Ed. Never. He’ll tell you, I’m still in the fight. And I’m in the fight with him.”

Soul Patrol is playing across the U.S. and opens in the UK on November 13.