Five young African American soldiers are listening to the radio in the jungle of Vietnam when they learn that one of their bravest has died—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., felled not by a Vietcong bullet, but by a white racist’s rifle 9,000 miles away in Tennessee. At the end of the broadcast, the enemy propagandist asks a question that pierces each of them: “Black American soldiers, what are you fighting for?”

It’s one of the most powerful moments in Spike Lee’s new film Da 5 Bloods—a war drama, a treasure hunt, and a grumpy-old-guys comedy that switches tone from heartache to humor to horror in a heartbeat.

The movie stars Delroy Lindo (who previously worked with Lee on Crooklyn and Clockers), Broadway icon Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr. (The Wire and Lee’s BlacKkKlansman and 25th Hour), and Clarke Peters (also known for The Wire and Lee’s Red Hook Summer) as four of Da 5 Bloods who survived the war and are now venturing back to find the remains of their fallen squad leader Norman (played by Black Panther’s Chadwick Boseman).

King’s assassination makes the characters confront their willingness to die for a country that too often doesn’t think their lives matter at all. Five decades later, when the veterans reunite, they’ve changed immeasurably, and so has Vietnam, but that question remains the same.

“Let me tell you a story,” Lee told Vanity Fair. “The United States Armed Forces came close to being torn apart when black soldiers heard that Dr. King was assassinated. They also heard that their brothers and sisters were tearing shit up in over 100 cities across America. The tipping point came very close; the black soldiers were getting ready to set it off in Vietnam—and not against the Vietcong either.”

Lee’s band of brothers story, debuting June 12 on Netflix, is the Oscar-winning director’s expression of heartfelt patriotism, the kind that’s tested, and the movie is threaded with interstitial cutaways highlighting a history of black valor seldom taught in schools.

“We’ve always believed in this country. That is why we fought for this country, even knowing we were slaves, in the Civil War,” Lee said. “That is the reason why I show Milton Olive III, 18 years old, the first African American to be awarded the Medal of Honor and Purple Heart in Vietnam. That’s why I show Crispus Attucks, the first American, not just a black person, the first American to die for the United States in the American Revolutionary War at The Boston Massacre.”

“That’s why when Agent Orange talks about, ‘If you don’t like America you can leave…’ Fuck that!” Lee said with a big laugh. (Agent Orange, if you didn’t guess, is his nickname for Donald Trump.) “We built this motherfucker! I mean, we’ve been nothing but patriotic! And this great, great country has not really made its promise yet to people of color.”

Trump plays an unexpected background role in the film. Lindo’s character, the abrasive, domineering Paul, shocks his old friends by revealing he’s a supporter. “It’s something that my mother taught me very early on,” the filmmaker explained. “She’d say, ‘Spike, all black people ain’t the same. All black people don’t look alike, or think alike.’ So we’ve got this group, and I had to show some type of diversity amongst these African American men. They can’t be all alike—that’s not only stupid, it’s not dramatic. [...] And there are a small minority of black folks who drank the orange Kool-Aid. To make him more dramatic, Paul is a MAGA-hat-wearing motherfucker.”

Paul’s politics shock and disorient his old friends. Lewis’s Eddie is the rich one of the bunch, his fortune having underwritten their overseas reunion. Whitlock’s Melvin is the sweetheart of the team, the fun-loving jokester. Peters’s Otis is the quiet one, the introspective de facto leader. He’s also perhaps the most stable. “You know why that is? Because he was a medic,” Lee said. “As he says, he took several bullets out of Paul’s black ass.” Otis was saving lives during the war instead of taking them, which gives him a measure of peace, while Paul is still haunted by the bloodshed he witnessed and perpetrated. “He has demons. The war did that to him. He’s a twisted, tragic character.” The director calls his MAGA hat “the cherry on the top”: “It’s evidence that they know that he’s not the same.”

Paul has been so erratic that his grown son David, played by Jonathan Majors (The Last Black Man in San Francisco), accompanies his father to Vietnam, even though the two are often at odds.

The men’s reunion has a purpose beyond just reminiscing about not-so-good old days. The men are gathering for their fallen squad leader, who didn’t get the chance to grow old. He’s still buried in one of the jungle valleys, and they want him to get a proper burial back in the States. Also, there’s something else buried near him that the men want: gold bars lost long ago by the CIA in the war zone.

After a firefight, the Bloods found the gold and hid it at the site of a plane crash where Norman lost his life, and now they see the fortune as reparations of a sort—money that could help fund good causes for civil rights and equality back in the U.S. Or…maybe they themselves are good enough causes. Greed and betrayal becomes a factor. “Gold! There’s gold in them hills,” Lee said. “Gold does strange things to people.”

Here’s where Da 5 Bloods crosses Vietnam with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Lee and cowriter Kevin Willmott (who shared an Oscar with him for BlacKkKlansman) even manage to paraphrase that 1948 John Huston film’s most famous line: “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.”

“I’ve always given homages to films I love in my films,” said Lee, citing several shoutouts in Da 5 Bloods to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, another Lee favorite. “I want to go on record on this. I’m not being disrespectful to any Vietnam film that’s been made, except maybe The Green Berets with John Wayne, who is not a hero of mine.”

At the beginning of the film, the surviving Bloods talk about how few movies focus on the experience of black Vietnam soldiers, and this movie might have been another if Lee hadn’t become involved.

“In the Year of Our Lord 2013, two filmmakers, their names are Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo, who is no longer with us, wrote a spec script called The Last Tour, about a group of four Vietnam vets who were returning to Vietnam to find the remains of their squad leader and the gold that’s buried with him,” Lee said. “In 2014 my coproducer, Lloyd Levin, optioned the script and brought it to Oliver Stone, who had it for two years, and in 2016 he walked away. I’ve not spoken to Oliver, so I don’t know what happened.”

In 2017 Levin brought the script to Lee and Willmott. “We wanted to do it, but we wanted to make changes,” Lee said. “We wanted to make the story about African American Vietnam vets.”

Another major alteration: “We wanted to include the music from one of the greatest albums of all time, in my opinion: Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On,” Lee said. “Marvin Gaye’s brother, Frankie, did three tours in Vietnam. He was a radio operator. And he would write Marvin all the time, so Marvin was getting a firsthand account from his brother about the horrors of the war. Those letters were really the impetus of one of the greatest albums of all time, so I wanted to include Marvin’s songs.”

The music adds a haunting quality to Da 5 Bloods and is a reminder of the many ways Lee’s film crosses genres. It’s not just a war film, treasure hunt, and buddy comedy—it’s also a ghost story. Not in a literal sense, but in the way those who are long gone never really leave us. Especially those taken too soon.

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