Soul Patrol: Unearthing the Untold Story of Vietnam's First Black Special Ops Team

From the mountains of Park City comes one of Sundance 2026's most urgent documentaries—a film that excavates a deliberately buried chapter of American military history and asks whether confronting the past can finally heal those who lived it.

Director J.M. Harper's "Soul Patrol" brings together the surviving members of Company F, 51st Infantry—the Vietnam War's first all-Black special operations unit. These weren't just young enlistees. They were teenagers, some escaping poverty in South Carolina's fields and others looking for meaning. They were thrust into the Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol (LURP), where they did very dangerous missions deep behind enemy lines. Other soldiers called them "Soul Patrol," a name that showed both friendship and the burden of being different, even though they were risking everything for their country.

Harper's movie is based on Ed Emmanuel's 2003 memoir of the same name. It uses old footage, interviews, and reenactments to show what these men went through both at home and abroad. As they made their way through the jungles of Vietnam in 1968, violence broke out on American streets in the fight for civil rights. Despite being disproportionately represented in combat deaths, Black soldiers remained largely invisible in media coverage and undervalued by the nation they served.

Competing in the U.S. Documentary Competition and produced by Sam Bisbee, Danielle Massie, Nasir Jones, and Peter Bittenbender alongside Harper, "Soul Patrol" doesn't just chronicle war—it examines the profound identity crisis of what it meant to be a "soul brother" fighting for a country that refused to fight for you. Harper takes us on a journey through shame, loneliness, and the radical idea of collective healing as Emmanuel brings his team back together decades later to deal with their shared trauma.

This documentary is more than overdue recognition. It's a reckoning.