Letters to the Editor
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callousness towards the Iraqi people
Sorry to go all political on this article about cinema, but I saw something about the "American Soldier" documentary that I needed to comment about:
They also talk about Iraq and Iraqis with a shocking callousness, and if human sensibility and empathy are inevitable casualties of war, they are ones we can ill afford.
This is one of the unfortunate offshoots of how our military trains its soldiers. In order for them to act as a cohesive unit and react on the battlefield without fail, the US military has implemented a system (basic training, pretty much), that breaks down the soldier and then builds him/her up again as a member of the tightly interwoven unit. The bond between soldiers rivals family bonds, and the enemy is dehumanized.
Having gone through this training, soldiers will, when ordered, fire on the enemy without hesitation pretty much 100% of the time (as opposed to less than half the time during WWI, if I recall my sources correctly). This level of discipline is one of the keys to the effectiveness of our military as a fighting force -- but sadly, one of the weaknesses of our military as a peacekeeping force.
The men and women of our military are doing their damnedest to fulfill their mission, and most assuredly struggle to sympathize with the citizens they're now charged with protecting and working alongside with. It's a sad state of affairs when our military's civilian and military leadership could not anticipate the inevitable results of this training when the goals shift from battlefield victory to keeping the peace.
But then, it's this very same leadership that's now building 12 foot high concrete walls around neighborhoods in Baghdad. Is there no one even remotely intelligent enough to see the similarities between these walls and the walls the Israeli government is putting up around Palestinian neighborhoods? And yet our leaders seemed perplexed that our presence in Iraq is viewed by the Iraqi people as an occupation with more nefarious goals in mind. Gee, wonder where they get that idea?
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A thoughtful, well-written letter swilldog
What's on your DD214 again?
As for O'Hehir, thanks for at least including a hundred or so words about the documentary, squeezing it in as you did, at the end, after examining in exquisite detail the banal, mundane and irrelevant crap you feed on.
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John Laurence
Laurence is quite a reporter, and has been doing a splendid job, often at great personal cost, since Vietnam. I can not recommend his excellent Vietnam-era memoir The Cat From Hue strongly enough.
He was also the correspondent at the heart of CBS' program-length docco The World of Charlie Company, a memorable take on life in the field as a grunt in Vietnam.
From the NYT review of the book, also mentioning the CBS documentary, found at www.thecatfromhue.com:
Laurence capped his Vietnam tours with ''The World of Charlie Company,'' an extraordinary documentary, broadcast by CBS in 1970. In ''The Cat From Hue,'' he discusses the making of the film in detail, and it stands as an epitaph of the war's futility. In the film, the soldiers speak for themselves. They know they neither should be, nor want to be, in Vietnam. By this time drug and alcohol abuse in the Army was widespread, and the disconnect between officers and G.I.'s had become ever more apparent. After initially approving and aiding the project, the military shut it down. ''The generals must have known, better than we, that when good soldiers argue openly about the wisdom of fighting a war, as they had in Charlie Company, the war is lost,'' he notes. Shortly after the film was broadcast, a West Point military instructor asked CBS for permission to show it to his classes.
Those who still regard Vietnam as a great moral crusade, who continue to insist that the military would have won had it been properly supported, and who blame the biased reporting of the news media for turning the nation against the war, probably would indict Laurence as a willing accomplice in the outcome. But he offers ample evidence of the futility and disillusionment felt by both Americans and Vietnamese. Pilots related their frustration with the ineffectiveness of their bombing; the military's daily press briefings had no correlation to reality; search-and-destroy missions had turned into the destruction of peasant villages, ostensibly to save them -- it was all there, waiting to be reported. John Laurence and the news media did not concoct the estrangement between reality and the official versions of the war.
With a hat tip to both Yogi Berra and John Fogerty, it's deja vu all over again...
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my DD214?
Garry Owen wrote:
What's on your DD214 again?
Um... what does my military service, or lack thereof, have to do with anything? Is there some sort of law or divine mandate that only soldiers and former soldiers are allowed to talk about the military?
Was there something about what I wrote that was off-limits or otherwise offensive to those who have served? I'm honestly curious.
Or am I misunderstanding your comment somehow?
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Swilldog...
It's been my experience from posting on various semi-military blogs ("semi" meaning retired or wannabe - there's alot of wannabes out there - funny cause the army could really use the help) that they are unusually offended at the mere mention that their black and white worldview is in direct correlation to the "deprogramming" that happens in basic.
Instilled with a zealousness that is only reinforced by the fact that they spend 99% of their lives with other military personnel or families of the military, they are unable to see any other viewpoint but their own infallible, programmed and government-approved viewpoint.
I've spent hours trying to explain to right-wing bloggers that mili-bloggers who write about the overwhelming success of the "surge" are only parroting, knowingly or unknowingly, their superior's viewpoints. Superiors, who in turn are only parroting their superiors' ad infinitum all the way up to the commander-in-chief.
Like your original post said, its what the basic training program was designed to do: "Question Authority" could be deadly when bullets are flying by. But it does fuck with your independent reasoning skills.
Just don't mention it to active military. No one likes to be told that they are unable to think for themselves, despite whether its rather obvious that they can't.