March 11, 2010
My college classmate Roger, a physician at the Fort Lewis Army base in Tacoma, Wash., came for a few days' visit early last November. In addition to the plays, concerts, and tourist sites he wanted to see, he searched the movie listings for one film: The Hurt Locker.
"It's a story about an Army bomb squad in Iraq," he told me. "A friend of mine recommended it — he's a very thoughtful ex- Green Beret. It's not playing anywhere in the Seattle area, but it's got to be here in New York."
It was, at only one place, an art-house in the Village. We went to an early-evening weekday show. The theater was practically empty, and most of those that were there were folks like us, Vietnam-era Boomers, some of them apparent veterans, a few with disabilities.
"I think it's hard to find this movie because most people don't want to deal with Iraq and Afghanistan," he guessed as we settled in with popcorn and sodas. "They don't want to hear about it or think much about it because it doesn't affect them directly. They go to the movies to escape, not to face hard questions."
So it was a big surprise to both of us that The Hurt Lockerswept the Oscars last Sunday. Now venues nationwide will multiply, and people will go just to see what they'd ignored all these months.
They won't be disappointed.
What makes this film unique and prize-winning is that it's not your standard war film — but that's because Iraq was not your standard war. In conventional war movies, as in conventional wars, there is a defined, uniformed enemy engaging in defined battle; battles are followed by relative calm, a time of release before the next conflict begins. In this film, as in Iraq itself, there is little release, and in that sense it falls more in the genre of suspense or horror. The tension is unrelieved because, as in a horror movie, no one really knows who or what the enemy is or when or where it will strike next: terror on every side.
Scenes showing the obsessed explosives expert Sergeant William James, played by Jeremy Renner, delicately unearthing improvised explosive devices and deftly snipping detonation wires keep your stomach in knots, and when the last critical wire is cut, you want to sigh in relief — but you can't. Your stomach knots again as the camera pans past alleyways and doors and balconies where Iraqis stand looking, watching, some with camcorders and some with cell phones, then turns to the three- member squad, themselves panning the same surroundings with their rifles.
There is no respite to the anxiety because it's clear that any one of these ordinary-looking people, man, woman, or child, could be a killer.
It is this unrelenting uncertainty that makes the film an overpowering experience. It is also the real-life uncertainty in the minds of the troops that has surely contributed to the extraordinarily high incidence of psychological trauma among our soldiers — one in five, by some estimates. It is horrible enough to kill a uniformed enemy, but there the guilt can be salved by clearly knowing exactly who the enemy are. In the conflicts in Iraq and now Afghanistan, the enemy could be anyone at all.
Prior to his medical career, Roger served as an officer in the Army; today he continues to serve those wounded in combat, both physically and psychologically. He knows things from the inside.
The other day, he e-mailed me: "This morning I heard a report about one of the hardest-hit platoons in Iraq, covered by a journalist who wrote a book about them called They Fought for Each Other. It was heartbreaking to listen to the trauma they had to endure. The platoon had been so over-exposed to IED's and death that they actually refused to go out on patrol one day, as they all met with a psych counselor and told him they would likely shoot anyone in sight due to their anger, and they felt it would be inadvisable to go out. The psychologist agreed, but the commander didn't, and they still didn't go out — a small act of mutiny which went unpunished. In the end, the commander actually praised the soldiers' judgment in staying behind."
Months after seeing it, the film was still playing in his head as it was in mine, as the invasion of Marja in Afghanistan began, the roads to which and in which were strewn with Taliban IED's.
In another e-mail, Roger wrote: "One line that impressed me in the movie was when Sgt. James is disarming a bomb and encounters the recalcitrant Iraqi driver who doesn't want to get out of his way. After finally forcing him to back up his car by putting a gun to his head, the sergeant's comrades jerk the Iraqi out of his car and beat him up. The sergeant says, ‘If he wasn't a terrorist before, he is now.' My impression is that war brutalizes everyone it touches — the good guys and the bad guys, from whatever perspective you define those terms. While we praise the sacrifices of our military people, we don't realize the physical and psychological devastation ravaged upon them by repeated ‘deployments' to war zones, especially to war zones as weird as those we are in now."
The Hurt Locker captures that weirdness precisely.
Showing posts with label iraq. Show all posts
Showing posts with label iraq. Show all posts
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
FROM ALASKA TO IRAQ
By Roger Repohl
THE BRONX, N.Y. - Last week the PBS documentary series “The American Experience” aired “Building the Alaska Highway,” Tracy Heather Strain’s taut and telling account of one of the most spectacular engineering feats of World War II: 1,500 miles of road cut through virgin land in the harshest of environments and completed in under eight months.
Think about that. Now think about Iraq.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, faced with the very real possibility of a Japanese invasion from the north, the War Department set as top priority the construction of a supply route from Dawson Creek in British Columbia, through the Canadian Yukon to outside of Fairbanks, forging the last link between the 48 states and the heart of the Alaska Territory. Conceived by bureaucrats with little first-hand knowledge of sub-Arctic terrain and weather, the Alaska-Canada (or Alcan) Highway was begun in March of 1942. Eleven thousand soldiers of the Army Corps of Engineers, most of them raw recruits with no road-building experience, were sent up to do the job. Three of the seven regiments were African-American, put to their first great test of the war and proving their resourcefulness and grittiness. In addition, five thousand experienced Canadian and American civilian construction workers, supervised by the Public Roads Administration, complemented the force.
The plans of the bureaucrats were modified by reality. Seat-of-the-pants engineering built the highway: every obstacle forced a workaround, every failure forced a try-again. Bridging rivers and blasting rock were one thing; muskeg bogs that immobilized trucks and mosquitoes that ate you alive were quite another.
Enduring mythic hardship - frostbite in April, sweltering heat and insect-bite in July - these men completed the project on November 20, 1942, months ahead of schedule. And none too soon; that summer the Japanese had captured two of the Aleutian Islands at the westernmost tip of Alaska. The highway allowed a military buildup in Alaska that stymied the enemy’s ambitions and supplied the Soviet Army on the Eastern Front.
How was this remarkable feat of engineering and construction accomplished, and with such speed? It had to do with two things: attitude and apparatus.
As for attitude, the Army of 1942 was drawn from a nation of survivors of the Great Depression. Not only had people learned to endure economic hardship for over a decade, they had also been trained by Franklin Roosevelt to think collectively. Facing the Depression required a mustering of national will and the application of centralized power. When the U.S. Congress declared war in 1941 (yes, it actually declared war, not granted “war powers” to the President), the people’s will and the government’s power shifted from the enemy within to the enemy without. Would the U.S. have been able to conquer two mighty nations in less than four years had it not been steeled by its fight against poverty?
As for apparatus, the U.S. Army was an integral self-sustaining whole. It was not just a fighting force, it was its own support force as well. It maintained its own equipment, supplied its own provisions, built its own bridges and roads. It had all-around general expertise, invaluable for meeting all the unknowns and unexpecteds of war. There was little that it couldn’t do on its own, because its resources were its own and applied in a unified way.
Now think about Iraq. Think about Halliburton and Blackwater. Think about how long it’s been and how much has been spent and how little has been done. It’s all about attitude and apparatus.
The attitude of the country and its military subset is very different now. Ronald Reagan, FDR’s ideological opposite, retrained the nation away from collective commitment and toward individual gain. He trained it to see government as obstacle, not instrument. Self-interest, not the common good, became the operating ethic. Privatization was seen as the means to shrink an inept, costly federal bureaucracy while allowing free-market competition, efficient and self-regulating, to provide the best services at the lowest cost. The Invisible Hand of capitalism, not the meddling hand of central planning, would guide the nation.
Reagan’s social philosophy, like FDR’s before him, has endured long after he left the scene; its high-water mark may have been reached in the present administration, with its schemes for privatizing even the most hallowed national trust like public lands and Social Security.
Nowhere has this attitude been more misapplied than in the apparatus of the military. Over the years, and especially during the Rumsfeld tenure, the armed services have come to be run on a business model. The Army’s job is to fight; why should it have to deal with food or construction or other peripherals when private firms can do it all better and cheaper?
The multi-billion-dollar outsourcing mess in Iraq has proved that model wrong. Beyond the enormous profits made by private companies for support services, and beyond the spotty and shoddy attempts at “reconstruction,” is the debilitating effect of self-interest upon a military campaign. In Iraq it has reached right up to the fighting itself, where legions of mercenaries from firms like Blackwater compose a parallel army, making exponentially more money than the soldiers serving their country.
The issue in Iraq is more than money. The issue is fragmentation, both of resources and of will. If the military in its present configuration had to build that road in Alaska, they might still be working on it.
THE BRONX, N.Y. - Last week the PBS documentary series “The American Experience” aired “Building the Alaska Highway,” Tracy Heather Strain’s taut and telling account of one of the most spectacular engineering feats of World War II: 1,500 miles of road cut through virgin land in the harshest of environments and completed in under eight months.
Think about that. Now think about Iraq.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, faced with the very real possibility of a Japanese invasion from the north, the War Department set as top priority the construction of a supply route from Dawson Creek in British Columbia, through the Canadian Yukon to outside of Fairbanks, forging the last link between the 48 states and the heart of the Alaska Territory. Conceived by bureaucrats with little first-hand knowledge of sub-Arctic terrain and weather, the Alaska-Canada (or Alcan) Highway was begun in March of 1942. Eleven thousand soldiers of the Army Corps of Engineers, most of them raw recruits with no road-building experience, were sent up to do the job. Three of the seven regiments were African-American, put to their first great test of the war and proving their resourcefulness and grittiness. In addition, five thousand experienced Canadian and American civilian construction workers, supervised by the Public Roads Administration, complemented the force.
The plans of the bureaucrats were modified by reality. Seat-of-the-pants engineering built the highway: every obstacle forced a workaround, every failure forced a try-again. Bridging rivers and blasting rock were one thing; muskeg bogs that immobilized trucks and mosquitoes that ate you alive were quite another.
Enduring mythic hardship - frostbite in April, sweltering heat and insect-bite in July - these men completed the project on November 20, 1942, months ahead of schedule. And none too soon; that summer the Japanese had captured two of the Aleutian Islands at the westernmost tip of Alaska. The highway allowed a military buildup in Alaska that stymied the enemy’s ambitions and supplied the Soviet Army on the Eastern Front.
How was this remarkable feat of engineering and construction accomplished, and with such speed? It had to do with two things: attitude and apparatus.
As for attitude, the Army of 1942 was drawn from a nation of survivors of the Great Depression. Not only had people learned to endure economic hardship for over a decade, they had also been trained by Franklin Roosevelt to think collectively. Facing the Depression required a mustering of national will and the application of centralized power. When the U.S. Congress declared war in 1941 (yes, it actually declared war, not granted “war powers” to the President), the people’s will and the government’s power shifted from the enemy within to the enemy without. Would the U.S. have been able to conquer two mighty nations in less than four years had it not been steeled by its fight against poverty?
As for apparatus, the U.S. Army was an integral self-sustaining whole. It was not just a fighting force, it was its own support force as well. It maintained its own equipment, supplied its own provisions, built its own bridges and roads. It had all-around general expertise, invaluable for meeting all the unknowns and unexpecteds of war. There was little that it couldn’t do on its own, because its resources were its own and applied in a unified way.
Now think about Iraq. Think about Halliburton and Blackwater. Think about how long it’s been and how much has been spent and how little has been done. It’s all about attitude and apparatus.
The attitude of the country and its military subset is very different now. Ronald Reagan, FDR’s ideological opposite, retrained the nation away from collective commitment and toward individual gain. He trained it to see government as obstacle, not instrument. Self-interest, not the common good, became the operating ethic. Privatization was seen as the means to shrink an inept, costly federal bureaucracy while allowing free-market competition, efficient and self-regulating, to provide the best services at the lowest cost. The Invisible Hand of capitalism, not the meddling hand of central planning, would guide the nation.
Reagan’s social philosophy, like FDR’s before him, has endured long after he left the scene; its high-water mark may have been reached in the present administration, with its schemes for privatizing even the most hallowed national trust like public lands and Social Security.
Nowhere has this attitude been more misapplied than in the apparatus of the military. Over the years, and especially during the Rumsfeld tenure, the armed services have come to be run on a business model. The Army’s job is to fight; why should it have to deal with food or construction or other peripherals when private firms can do it all better and cheaper?
The multi-billion-dollar outsourcing mess in Iraq has proved that model wrong. Beyond the enormous profits made by private companies for support services, and beyond the spotty and shoddy attempts at “reconstruction,” is the debilitating effect of self-interest upon a military campaign. In Iraq it has reached right up to the fighting itself, where legions of mercenaries from firms like Blackwater compose a parallel army, making exponentially more money than the soldiers serving their country.
The issue in Iraq is more than money. The issue is fragmentation, both of resources and of will. If the military in its present configuration had to build that road in Alaska, they might still be working on it.
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