A direct and incredibly moving personal memorial to the losses incurred on both sides of the Vietnam War, Barbara Sonneborn's documentary Regret To Inform is an achingly cathartic attempt to salvage meaningful scraps of humanity from a meaningless conflict. On her 24th birthday, Sonneborn received notice that her husband and high-school sweetheart, Jeff Gurvitz, had been killed in a mortar attack at Khe Sanh. Twenty years later, still haunted by unresolved feelings about his death and the war, she and translator Xuan Ngoc Evans, another widow with harrowing stories of her own, traveled to Vietnam looking for solace. Pieced together with the usual melange of talking heads, home movies, photographs, and archival footage, Regret To Inform uses Sonneborn's somewhat contrived journey as a through line for powerful testimonials from American and Vietnamese war widows. A recurring theme among the disillusioned American soldiers is how they didn't want their wives to know exactly what they were doing for their country. One private insists that his letters only get into the weather and other trivial, day-to-day banalities; Gurvitz, in a tortured snippet from a tape recording, talks of being "a bystander," watching himself do things he never thought or wished he could do. But the most wrenching passages come from Vietnamese women who witnessed the atrocities firsthand. Only a teenager at the time, Evans vividly recalls her home and village being burned to the ground and standing behind her 5-year-old cousin as he was shot while leaving their hiding place for water. With her uniquely affecting slant on an oft-covered tragedy, Sonneborn reaches for universal truths and finds them, performing a belated wake that brings these women some measure of comfort, even if their old wounds never fully heal.