On March 16, 2001, while I was surfing the internet, entering my name and family members' names into a search engine to see if anyone had become famous yet, I made a gut-wrenching discovery. I found an article entitled, "The Death of PCF 43." It was an account of the last day of my father's life - with information no one in my family had ever known - written by a man who had been there, on my father's boat in the Mekong Delta, and who had witnessed him die.

It had been almost thirty-two years since the incident on April 12, 1969 that took the life of Lt. Donald Glenn Droz - and even though I thought about my father every day, I rarely talked about him. I knew asking questions about him brought up painful memories for the people I love, and so I seldom did.

I didn't tell anyone about the article for two days. The manner of my father's death was less important than was his life. It was a crude, violent postscript. What good did it do to know the story? But I kept the page on my computer - I kept going back to it - not quite believing it was true, feeling like I had somehow stumbled upon some kind of mistake. And each time, he was there.

Seeing his name - amid the adjectives and military acronyms - was like seeing his face, the face I had seen alive only once, when I was three months old. The face I knew only from pictures, under a white Navy officer's hat, smiling with those two dimples, exactly like mine. His history, my history, stared back at me from my computer screen.

The telegram the Navy sent on April 13, 1969 told us that my father had been killed while on PCF 51. Now we knew the truth - he was on PCF 43, his boat, with his crew, on a risky mission to transport an underwater demolition team and over eight hundred pounds of explosives up the Duong Keo canal. The 43 stalled, succumbing to her heavy bulk, a rocket exploded, and my father was mortally wounded.

Until now, my mother and I have never known the details of my father's death and it has been too painful to talk about his life. But with my discovery and the overwhelming grief it brings, my need to know my father, to fill the void in me with something, anything, that is him, becomes too much to bear.

A JOURNEY BEGINS

I need to go beyond two dimensions of photographs and computer screens and find the twenty-five year old man who gave me his eyes, his dimples, and my life, and who so much wanted to come home and be my father.

My discovery has brought my mother back to that Sunday afternoon when the man in uniform came to our door. Now, so many Sundays later, my mother can barely breathe. Getting this news, thirty-two years later, was like losing my father all over again. Her jaw clenches when I ask her to sit down with me and remember my father. For her, the memories are buried deep, shrouded in pain and unresolved emotion. My father will always be in her heart, she says - she doesn't need to speak of him. Her memories are enough.

"But I need you to speak of him," I tell her. "I want to have memories of my own." Camera-in-hand, I tell her that no matter how difficult this is for her and for us, I don't want to quiet our feelings and fall back into the business of our lives. The article we now hold in our hands, the searing details it contains - this has changed us more than we know. Without a full understanding of why and how, I know, we can only move forward.

A TRUNK OPENS

For thirty-two years, my mother has kept my father's trunk locked away. For thirty-two years, I haven't known it was there. Now, my mother takes it out, and together, for the first time since my father's death, we open it.

Inside, we find an empty champagne bottle and dirty laundry, slides of Vietnam, a toy car and cheap cigars. There are lists of vocabulary words my father wanted to learn.

I hear my father's voice for the first time - distant, at the other end of a bad connection, a phone call my mother tape recorded thirty-four years ago. "When are you going to come home?" she asks. "I don't know," he answers. "About a year."

My mother then tells me about the suitcase she has kept under a stack of shoeboxes in her closet. It is filled with letters from my father, every one he wrote her. Some close with "be good, smile pretty" - advice he may have given me if he had lived.

The tears that come with each letter, each memory, seem to know no end. With every story and glimpse of my father, I also begin to have a deeper sense of my mother and who she was before. I hear a tape-recording of her voice - her southern drawl, the way she teased and flirted. Once, she was carefree, funny and optimistic. Today, she is entirely different.

My mother tells me now that a part of her died with my father. A part of her is buried in his grave - her hope, her love of life, her future. When my father died, she became angry - furious at a government and military who would send her husband to die in a "pointless war" - and she became active in the anti-war movement. In her own heart, she felt she was marching to save lives - not to shame the soldiers who were there, but to bring them home. "Listen to the casualty statistics," she said in one of her speeches, "And dear God, hear them."

In November 1969, she lead the March Against Death, which was a single-file, candlelight march that lasted over twenty-four hours. It was part of one of the largest demonstrations ever held at the nation’s capital. My mother was the first in line. She is still remembered for what she did and said that day.

"It began at twilight on a Thursday in November 1969. Seven drummers - beating a funeral roll - stepped toward the White House and the Capitol. Behind, single file, came the marchers - each one wearing a hand-lettered placard around his neck bearing the name of a GI killed in Vietnam. They cupped hands over lighted candles, protecting them from the Potomac's icy wind. In front of the White House, each marcher called out the name on his placard...At 8:39, Mrs. Judy Droz, a twenty-three-year old war widow from Missouri, dropped the first placard into the coffin..." LONG TIME PASSING By Myra MacPherson.

"Mrs. Judy Droz, a petite twenty-three year-old brunette from Columbia, Missouri, eyes staring straight ahead, face blank, marched with a slow, steady step. A widow with a ten-month-old daughter, she bore the name of her late husband...'I am here to express my feelings as well as those of my late husband,' she said before the march began. 'There is no light at the end of this tunnel. There is only the darkness that closed in on my husband…'" MORATORIUM - AN AMERICAN PROTEST by Paul Hoffman.

A MEMORY TANGLED IN WAR

I listen to a tape recording of my mother's speech - and while it makes me proud - it also fills me with profound sadness. Her voice is hard, angry. Sitting in my mother's living room, thirty-two years between then and now, my mother says she hears it, too - how she walled the pain off and shut down.

For all her talk of pacifism and activism and "speaking truth to power," I recognize how my mother was so angered by the war that caused my father's death, so determined not to let his death go unnoticed, that she never allowed herself, or me, to mourn.

Now, without the anger and speechmaking to lean on, all that remains for my mother is a sinking, profound loss, she can no longer avoid. She retreats, not knowing how she will live through this grief, thirty-two years later.

With my discovery, I know I have propelled us both on a journey, one I have longed to take, one my mother never wanted or thought she needed to take.

The past two months have been a whirlwind. We traveled to Washington, D.C. and captured my mother and grandmother's visit to the Wall and the Swift Boat memorial at the Naval Yard on the Potomac. Senator John Kerry and Stephen Hayes, both of whom served with my father, graciously welcomed our cameras and shared their memories and grief. Senator Kerry remembered the games he and my father played when they came back from patrol - shooting off flares, diving off boats into their wake - the games of young men who were happy to be alive. Stephen Hayes remembers having dinner with my father the night before he was killed. He recalls my father's fear and anxiety - he knew he was about to embark on a dangerous mission. That night, which turns out to have been my father's last, haunts Stephen to this day.

We traveled to Rich Hill, Missouri to talk with my father's family and high school classmates who remember my father well and still mourn his loss. Paul Droz remembers his brother sending him twenty-one one dollar bills on his twenty-first birthday and writing that he'd be home next year to celebrate. Ron Thompson remembers their "Tiger initiation" for the football team. Rhoda Hoover remembers my father's habit of pulling her pony-tail. My grandmother Droz remembers crawling on her hands and knees to say good-bye to my father’s body.

We have also begun the process of recording other children's stories. On what would have been his father's fifty-third birthday, T. Scott Nalley of Centreville, VA invited our cameras into his home and shared with us the impact of losing his father to the Vietnam War. Scott was nine months old when his father, a Marine, was killed on his last day in the field in Operation Meade River. Scott's favorite stories are the small ones - about when his father hurt his hand in the washing machine, when he hid a pack of firecrackers he wasn't supposed to have.

It's the human stories, often the hardest to share, that are the most important. They help us know that we had fathers who were real - quirky, funny, mischievous, irreverent and even clumsy. These stories make our fathers come alive, if even just a little. They also help us have a better understanding of ourselves - so we can live not in the shadow of God-like creatures who never erred, in comparison to whom we will always be inadequate, but instead strengthened in the knowledge that our fathers were real, young men, with blemishes and fears, who faced difficult choices, who fought in a war that wounded the nation and that many now want to forget, and who wanted more than anything to come home to us.

I am writing this in the wake of the tragedy. It is worse than anyone could ever have imagined. So many innocent lives ended, so much suffering, so much wreckage. How can we begin to make sense of such a violent, hateful attack? The images we have seen and heard: a final phone call made to a loved one, a man jumping to his death, the way the crumbling buildings fell sparing one man and not the other. How can we comprehend why? How can we explain the horror? How will any of us ever recover?

If there is anything that I have learned in the past six months, it is the importance of grief. No matter what our background or religious belief, we all need to grieve. This means participating in ceremonies, telling stories, lighting candles, being angry, and stopping the noise of our every day lives to allow ourselves to feel what has happened. If we deny ourselves this time, if we move too quickly to put on a happy face because that's what we think we should do, our loss will stay present tense. We will stay angry and fearful, and our pain will stay raw, even if it's locked away deep in our hearts.

In our society, mourning is not often encouraged. Tears are not welcome. Loss of hope is seen as a sign of weakness. I am no expert on any of this stuff. But from my own experience, I would encourage everyone to take the time you need, whatever time it is, to grieve.

As I continue on my journey, in encounter after encounter, I meet people who weren't allowed that time and are today still living with the trauma and stinging loss of the Vietnam War.

When I turn on my camera and start asking questions, whether in the Senate, on a pecan farm, in a dentist's office, or in my grandmother's kitchen, I am met with an outpouring of grief and gratitude. The people I am talking with know I have no hidden agenda, no news story to break. They have just been waiting and longing to tell their stories about their lost loves, their fallen comrades, their fathers, and their grief. I have discovered that in the telling of stories, and in the learning of mine, there is relief. This has become the larger purpose of Be Good, Smile Pretty.

PROJECT STATUS

In June, I met with Christine Ferguson and her daughter in New Orleans. Christine's father was in the Screaming Eagles, parachuted into a hostile area and killed two days before Christine was born. Our cameras were at The Wall on Father's Day and we met with Laurette Kanavos and Melanie Danna, both of whom lost fathers to the Vietnam War. From their lips, I heard my own words, about the longing which so often goes unspoken. Vietnam was different from other wars. There is still such pain and guilt, so they don't talk about their fathers. They, too, have grieved in silence. But on this day, in front of our cameras, they were eager to talk about their fathers and about their loss. We showed each other photographs; we read each other letters. Our thoughts were not about politics or foreign policy. Our thoughts were about our fathers.

After meeting with Stephen Hayes in May, we were introduced to Tedd Peck of Santa Rosa, California. We learned that in December 1968, Tedd went to the violent Mekong Delta in my father's place in exchange for three bottles of scotch - a trade my father desperately negotiated so that he might live to meet me. We met with Tedd in his home on a sunny Sunday in July. He cried when he met us, and hugged us tight. He said that he has thought about my father every day, but had not spoken about him for thirty-two years.

Tedd then introduced us to Bill Rood of Naperville, Illinois. Bill Rood, Senator Kerry and my father often went on operations together in the Mekong Delta. Bill shared his feelings of hopelessness in being in a hospital on the day my father was killed. He said that he's always felt that if he had been there, somehow he might have been able to save him.

There is so much guilt so many survivors feel. Why did the bullets fly the way they did? There is nothing that can ever adequately answer this question.

In August, we traveled to Unionville, Connecticut to meet with Peter Upton, the author of "The Death of the 43." He sat with us for a full day, remembering what happened on April 12, 1969. He described seeing my father and other men die around him, the sense of what he calls "existential vertigo," of having gone to Vietnam with a deep respect for country and service and then, in the Mekong Delta, feeling utterly betrayed.

Senator Kerry introduced us to Skip Barker, who wrote a letter on April 28, 1969 about the Battle of the Duong Keo and my father's death. In that letter, Skip described the operation as a grand finale of a grand fiasco and recounted finding the carcass of my father's blown-up boat and my father's body - how he stared at my father's non-regulation brown shoes, covered in blood, and how "it was the most sickening sight" of his twenty-five years.

Over the past few months, I have seen and heard many painful things. I have seen photographs of my father's body on a stretcher. I have heard the audio tapes of his radio cries for help on the day he was killed. Somehow, even these ugly details bring me closer to him. Now, not only do I know the good stories of his accomplishment and hope, but I also know the stories of his Vietnam experience, his fear and his desperate struggle to live. I have needed to know all of this, so that I can know my father fully and so that I can truly honor his memory.

April 12, 1969 is a day many will never be able to forget. One by one, my father's friends tell me the story of the battle of Duong Keo: a day of catch-up, mistakes, and an ambush; a day that haunts them ever still. They recount how my father was caught in the kill-zone - his boat, PCF 43, beached on the bank of the river, so much twisted aluminum, helpless for over forty-minutes. I hear a tape of the radio calls, my father's cries, "This is the 43, over, this is the 43, over!" - unanswered amidst the weapon fire and chaos. I learn how the shrapnel from a B-40 rocket hit him in the chest. I hear about the thirty minutes it took for him to die, his blood in the pilot house, what his body looked like, the last night his friends spent beside him on the river.

As I begin to know my father for the first time, I also begin to understand the deep scars that linger. Just as I need to mourn my father's death, so do many of his friends need to mourn not only his loss, but also the larger, collective loss of the Vietnam War. In telling the stories of my father's life and the experiences they shared in Vietnam, these men say that they, too, are helped. Just as I have needed them, they have needed me.

At the Naval Academy, my father is remembered for the stars he received in academics, and for having a hard time getting up in the morning. They show me the paths he walked, the mess hall where he ate, a sample midshipman's tidy room. I watch the parades of young men and women, marching in formation to the beat of a drum.

A Swift Boat skipper remembers my father's non-regulation brown shoes, worn as a subtle sign of protest ("The Navy can have everything but my feet...") - and how my father told stories with his hands. When we meet, he tells me I do the exact same thing with mine.

Sometimes the stories comfort me: the games of young men, happy to be alive; the gallons of grapefruit juice consumed in one day; the dogs they befriended; the Irish flag raised on St. Patrick's Day; my father's wicked sense of humor; the trade he made for three bottles of Scotch; how his nickname, "Dinky Delta," meant “crazy.” Sometimes the stories chill me: the terror; slippery blood on boat decks; unanswered cries on the radio; such hope; such desperate struggles to live.

In November and December, we made two trips to Coronado, California to visit the Naval Amphibious Base. There we met with Bill Shumadine, who came to the aid of PCF 43, Steven Carroll, who trained under my father in An Thoi, and Sharon Mendie whose father died just two weeks before he was to return from Vietnam.

There have been times recently when I look at the credit card bills and the work yet to be accomplished - the trips we still want to make, the months of editing before us, the expense of producing a rough-cut - and I wonder how I can ever see this through.

But then I think of my father and how hard he worked at the Naval Academy, how desperately he tried to survive Vietnam, and his sense of duty to his country in the face of confusion. I think about how I am growing closer to him every day I am on this journey. I think of my mother, who became a widow at 23-years-old and who for 32 years stifled her grief and pain. Then I think of all the people we have already met - their stories, their memories, their love for their fallen fathers and comrades - and the journeys so many like me have yet to take, and I think of the outpouring of generous support, the checks that appear in the mail, the letters of encouragement, the days of donated camerawork and production support that have allowed us to make it this far. I know I will see this film through, one way or the other.

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

I am beginning to lose track of the e-mails I've sent and the times I've made phone calls out of the blue and said, "I am Don Droz's daughter." For the first time in my life, I am meeting so many who knew and loved my father, as well as sons and daughters across the country who were left fatherless by the Vietnam War. I am finding I have a family and a community I never knew I had.

Where have they been my whole life?

I realize now more than ever how the politics, pain and divisiveness of the Vietnam War kept me and so many like me from knowing our fathers. In my own family, it was particularly complicated. Within months of my father's death, my mother became active in the anti-war movement. In her own heart, she felt she was marching to save lives, so that no more men had to die.

The fact that my mother spoke out and criticized the military meant that my father's friends from the Naval Academy and U.S.S. Little Rock and Vietnam stayed away. Even now, when I reach out to those who knew my father, I am often met with a question, "Which side are you on?" If not literally asked, the question is there, in a look of hesitation, in a moment of mistrust.

My answer is always the same: I am not on any side. I have no hidden agenda. My only objective is to know my father and in documenting this journey, to help others like me know theirs. The response is gracious and wonderful. Relieved that I do not want to blame them for the war or the military for my father's death, these men share their memories, with admiration, love and respect. They have wondered about me, they confess, ever since my father was killed. "I assumed you probably thought everyone in the military and government was evil," one man said to me. "You wouldn't want to hear from me."

No, I tell him. My whole life I've wanted to hear from you.

On March, 16, 2001, I found Peter Upton's story, "The Death of PCF 43" on the Internet. I remember distinctly the moment of my discovery. But even now, a year later, I struggle with how to describe that night - the randomness of how I stumbled across the article, the searing horror of what it contained, the way learning the details of my father's death propelled me on a journey to learn about and honor his life.

On March 16, 2002, my mother and I spent the entire day reading the letters my father wrote from Vietnam. He arrived in Southeast Asia in June of 1968, after two months of training in Coronado, California. His letters open with "Dearest Judy," "Jud," "Treasure" or "L.O.M.L" - short for "love of my life." And every single one of his letters includes a countdown to June 1969. He wrote so much about his dreams for the rest of his life and our family...post-Vietnam, post-Navy. He wrote about the books he was reading - Travels with Charley, Word Power Made Easy, How to Become a Millionaire. He asked my mother to send him travel posters to decorate his room, and was saving his gin rummy winnings so that he could buy a stereo or a cashmere coat in Hong Kong. During my mother's pregnancy, he wrote about my name - if I was a boy, my name would be "Randy" for Congressman Randall who appointed him to the Naval Academy; if I was a girl, "Kimberly…" and then, in the final month, they decided on "Tracy."

He was on patrol when I was born. In his letter of January 11, 1969, my father wrote:

"What can I say, honey? I'm just so proud, and happy, and relieved that Tracy has finally arrived and that you both are well. I've been passing out cigars all day today, in between various attempts to get a phone call through to you. I had the 4H patrol yesterday, and we were firing a mission on an abandoned village, when right in the middle of the mission (about 1 o'clock p.m.) we received a 27 group coded message from our division office. Well, needless to say, I was a little perturbed with the interruption, and sent my radarman to the main cabin to break the message. Anyway, he got as far as "To OINC. YOU ARE A FATH" when he shouted out, "Mr. Droz, you'd better get down here." So, we stopped the firing, pulled away from the coast and finished breaking the message. God, was I a nervous wreck! "I wish that I could see Tracy (and you) now, but I'll just have to keep looking forward to Hawaii. I'm sure the pictures will be sort of a shock, as it's really hard for me to comprehend that I'm a father! I have a patrol tomorrow, honey, so I'll write again in two days. I can't begin to say how much I love you. Your husband, Don"

In his last few months, my father's letters were less frequent. He was stationed in An Thoi and was sent up the winding rivers of the Mekong Delta on week-long patrols. Sometimes, he lost his usual good humor and wrote about his fear and depression. He also wrote about his deep frustration to be fighting a war even the South Vietnamese didn't seem interested in. He wrote of the country's poverty and how the money spent on the war effort would have been better spent on medical attention and food. He sensed that many of the people in the villages didn't care what kind of government they had - that the concerns of their life were much more basic.

In his last letter to my mother, however, he was optimistic:

" I am presently awaiting dinner on the USS Krishna, a Navy repair ship, while work is being done on the 43 boat (repairing the radar, changing the boat screws, etc.) The big operation with the Vietnamese Army and Marine units is working quite well. The next few days will determine how "productive" the operation is to be. Anyway, my opinion of the Vietnamese Military has already been improved. I doubted that I would have a chance to write you for a couple of weeks, but when the need arose for repairs, I was given this unexpected opportunity to write. I've received your letters of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th during the last couple of days. The picture of Tracy with "Grandpa Droz" is just darling! Do I ever miss her! Can you possibly imagine how much I've been thinking of you these past few days since returning from R&R? Everything about you is now so vivid in my mind. I could just die when I think that I must live without you for two more months. It's incredible how much two little months can mean. I love you and Tracy so much that all else in life seems truly secondary. I almost constantly think of our life in Hanover. Do you have any idea how wonderful you are to come home to? All my love, Don"

This letter was written at 4:30 p.m. on April 11, 1969 - the night before my father was killed - and arrived the week after my mother was notified of his death.

My mother is right when she says, none of this will bring my father back. She is right when she rocks in her chair and says that no matter how much we talk about him and read letters and look through the objects left in his trunk: his reel-to-reel audio tapes, his Vietnam slides, his toy Jaguar car, his cigars and cologne and frayed Coronado parking pass, the "Father-to-Be" brochure given to him on his one and only Father's Day - he will still be dead. We cannot rewrite the ending, she says. No matter what we do, the facts will stay the same: on April 12, 1969, my father died on a muddy river in the Mekong Delta, and he is never coming home.

But now, I realize how far I have come.

As painful as it has been, I have needed to take this journey. I have needed to know who my father was, how he died and how I might have been different if I'd had him in my life. I have needed to find him, to reclaim him, piece-by-piece, from what is left in people's memories, from what is left in his trunk. Now, I have a sense of my father, more than a statistic, more than a hero or a warrior, a hawk or a dove, untangled from the memory of a war that wounded a nation - simply, deeply, as a human being.

When this journey ends, when I come home, close the trunk and turn off the camera, I know I will be different.

THE ENDING HAS CHANGED

In the course of this journey, in some small way, I think I have changed the ending. In the past two years, for the first time in my life, my father has come alive, in small moments, in memories shared. Little by little, past the talk of politics, beyond the rhetoric and mistrust, past the sorrow and tears and silence, his life has taken shape like a puzzle piecing itself together. Now, I know where I came from and who I am as my father’s daughter. While the pain of my father’s loss will always hurt and the details of his death will always haunt me, I am a better person for knowing, for having a sense of my father and my family and the love that bound us, which endures, thirty-four years after his death, in letters, stories and memory.

While I will always want more, one more second, one more breath, one more anything of him -- for the first time in my life, I have just enough of him to remember and love and grieve. He would have been a great father. And when I smile, I have his eyes.

On October 17, my grandmother, Dorothy Droz, died without forewarning. Grandma Droz, as she was known to almost everyone, was my father's mother. And while she had a difficult life, she was a woman of strength and humor. No matter what hair-brained idea was presented to her, it was met with, "Why, sure - we'll see about that." And she wasn't brushing you off either. She meant it.

At the end of September, my mother and I had traveled to Rich Hill, Missouri to add the words "husband" and "father" to my dad's tombstone. True to the word she had given us when we were in Rich Hill in July and had recognized how important this change was to me, Grandma Droz made practically all the arrangements, authorized the addition, and then donated the money so the project could afford to do it.

That was typical of her. I remember back in March of 2001, when the notion to do this documentary first came to me, my mother was worried about what my grandmother would think, the pain it would put her through. But when I brought it up with Grandma Droz, there wasn't a moment's hesitation. She was aware of how sad and difficult it would be at times - but she also knew how much it would mean to me and, in her own words, she "liked for people to remember Don."

So, over the year and a half of filming, Grandma Droz put up with a lot: her crazy granddaughter turning her house upside-down, rearranging her furniture, videotaping her as she went to bed, making her adhere to a sometimes grueling shooting schedule that meant little sleep and traveling at a moment's notice, forcing her to change clothes in an airport bathroom stall, to pose for picture after picture, to crawl into the attic on her hands and knees to retrieve a suitcase of condolence letters - and she did it all.

Grandma Droz was 85 when she died. While I so dearly wanted her to see the finished film, I know she is with me in spirit. When the film is finished - at a lean 56 minutes - it will not only be in my father's memory, but in hers as well.

We have been busy editing for several months now. A month ago, we finished an 89 minute rough cut. This was met with much positive feedback - but we still have a mandate to get the film to 56 minutes.

In September, I was presented with a very great opportunity. I could receive funding through Independent Television Service, an amount which, when matched, would allow me to complete the film and would assure a PBS broadcast. The only catch was raising matching funds and the runtime PBS requires -- I would have to deliver a 56 minute film.

On the morning when I was to make my final decision -- do I accept the funding and agree to cut 250 hours of footage down to 56 minutes? Do I reject the funding and try to finish the film at, what seemed at the time, a more feasible, longer length? -- I got a call from Peter Upton.

Peter Upton wrote "Death of the 43," the article I found on the Internet in March 2001. It was this article and the details it provided about my father's death that inspired me to learn about my father's life and to record the memories on camera.

I told him about the decision I needed to make.

He was quiet for few moments and then he gave me the advice I see now I desperately needed. "Tracy," he began. "There was a reason you wanted to make this film." He listed them: to help those still grieving; to have the sacrifice and loss remembered. The only way I would really find closure, he went on to say, was to have as many people as possible see this film.

I realized then that it would be more of a "sell out" to turn down this great opportunity than to go through the painful process of editing the film to a television-viewing length. I would be denying the film to the audience I knew wanted and needed to see it. I would be turning it into something I had so strongly hoped it would never be: a vanity project. And so, with Peter Upton's good advice ringing in my ears, I accepted the funding and agreed to cut the film.

With over two hundred hours of footage to be edited down to one hour, not every wonderful story, detail or moment can be included. With a PBS broadcast imminent, I have to think beyond what this film fulfills for my family or me personally. The question, "Why am I doing this?" now takes on a significant weight - for the question must be asked on a much larger stage, to a much larger audience.

When I began this journey, eighteen months ago, I had a very basic and singular objective: to know my father. Finding Peter Upton's article on the Internet was the catalyst. Almost immediately, I knew the discovery would change my life. The details of the ambush and my father's death were specific and real for the first time. And now that I knew how he died, I was overwhelmed by the need to know how he lived.

The notion to have a camera in hand when I first spoke to my family about my father, to capture the stories that I was hearing for first time, I still can't fully explain. I was simply overwhelmed with the fear that some detail, some anything about my father would get lost. I didn't want what I was learning to be shaped or faded by memory any more than it already had been. I wanted the stories preserved as they were told.

Now, eighteen months, later, I have an even greater sense of why I needed to do this - and the story the film will tell. Sure, it's about who my father was -- that he had a blond spot on an otherwise brown head of hair, several cavities even though he brushed with Crest after every meal and a nickname that meant "crazy." But it's also about the grief that kept me from learning those simple details until now.

Before March of last year, my mother and I had never talked that much my father. We'd never read his letters. We'd never looked through his trunk. But now we have. And those conversations have led to others - about how deeply the loss of my father hurt our family, and what we need to do now, thirty-three years later, in some small measure, to heal.

Just as finding the article on the Internet was the catalyst for my journey, I hope the finished film will serve as a catalyst for other journeys. If this film can help even a handful of others, in my eyes, it will be a success.

After almost two years, we are less than a month away from having a final cut of BE GOOD, SMILE PRETTY. Our goal is to complete the film in time for the Swift Boat Sailors Reunion in Norfolk, Virginia on March 20. I plan to attend along with my Uncle Paul Droz, thanks to the generosity of the Swift Boat Sailors Association and Southwest Airlines. This will be the first private screening of the film.

It took seven grueling months of twelve and fourteen hour days, sometimes six days a week, but with the help of a wonderful editor, Jenna McFeely, the astute feedback of Michael Murphy and Randy Mason at our partnering station KCPT, as well as extensive notes from a screening committee at ITVS and counsel from executive producer, Chris Donahue, and my producer husband, Chris Tragos (who had seemingly infinite patience for screenings), we succeeding in cutting hundreds of hours down to mere 56 minutes.

In the end, I was able to include less than 0.4% of what I had shot. And as it turns out, this is typical of documentary production.

I want to thank all of you who agreed to be on camera, who remembered what a funny and irreverent man my father was, who told stories of Vietnam no matter how painful this was, and who shared your grief and the importance of remembering in spite of that pain.

I ask for your understanding and forgiveness if you were interviewed but do not appear in the final 56-minute film. Honestly, what landed on the cutting room floor had nothing to do with the importance of the stories or the incredible bravery it took for them to be shared. It is my sincere hope that over the years, the footage I captured that didn't make it into the film will be shared in many different forms -- and that your contribution will be recognized well beyond the 56 minutes that are broadcast.