Nation at War

I spent much of Friday and Saturday with a group of Soldiers' Angels, manning a "booth" at a theater that is showing Brothers at War.  Our goal was to educate movie goers about how they can "support the troops," and to draw attention to the movie among those who were there to see other films.  We were also lucky enough to meet producer Jake Rademacher, and one of the Marines seen in the film.

The film itself was terrific.  If I had it in my power, I'd be standing on street corners, handing out DVDs of it for free.  It's that important for people to see--especially civilians who may not know anyone in the military, or for whom 90% of what they think they know they've seen in the news and entertainment media.  As one Marine said enthusiastically, "It was the best damn movie I've seen in years!"

I had one of the most disconcerting and incongruous experiences in years watching the previews, though.  There were three previews--a gory but psychological horror flick that is probably going to be a pretty good representative of its genre, a movie about a mall cop, and a shoot-em-up involving a man whose heart is harvested and who somehow regains consciousness while a battery-operated heart is keeping his body alive before harvesting the rest of his organs.

The organ harvesting movie seemed to be a cross between a thriller and an action/revenge flick.  I couldn't help but think that whoever assigns trailers to movies had seriously missed the boat if they thought the target audience for Brothers at War had more than just incidental overlap with that genre (yes, young men are going to want to see Brothers at War, but that's only a small portion of the target audience).  I also winced at the sheer stupidity of some of the science alluded to in the clips.

But it was the mall cop trailer that nearly made me cry (or throw up, I'm not sure which).  The premise seems to be that a loser of a mall cop develops an obsession for a total tramp of a girl.  He goes on to see himself as a hero protecting her "innocence" from a flasher at the mall, a fantasy he acts out with violence, idiocy, and self-aggrandizement that co-opts (and then twists into mockery) the ideals of sheepdog-ness and the self-sacrifice of military/law-enforcement service or heroism.  Seen in light of what I expected the documentary would be, the idea that this is something people will want to watch was disturbing in a way I cannot even articulate. 

Then again, maybe I'm just an out-of-touch stick in the mud...

Earlier in the day, I had stood over the shoulder of a local TV reporter who asked a very young Marine with at least one combat deployment what he hoped people would take away after seeing the movie.  He started to say that he hoped people wouldn't look "so low..." then stopped himself and said that he hoped the movie would "raise their opinion of us." 

It was all I could do not to reach out right there and hug him, but I waited until the interview was over, before grabbing his shoulder.  "People that think like that aren't the majority," I said.  "They just have the most-amplified voices.  I hope you know that.  Most of us don't think that way."  His response was simply what young Marines revert to when they disagree or don't know what to say--a stone face and solemn "Yes, ma'am," after each of my sentences.

The showing of the movie I attended likely wouldn't have disabused him of his notions, either.  It was a Saturday night and there couldn't have been more than 75-100 people in the theater, which was about the same as Friday when our location had the second-highest attendance in the country for that day.  Even with having the director there to field questions, and Jon Voight to lend his star power...

On a personal level, watching the movie was emotional and touching and funny, but refeshing.  I can't think of another word to use other than refreshing, because it had the breath of the familiar that I never see when I'm living in my civilian world.  The soldiers I see in the news and TV shows and movies are so rarely like the people I know, but I "knew" every person on that screen last night--I've talked to them, hugged them, helped them out at the USO, watched the veil lift as they decide how much they want to share of their experiences, laughed with them, rolled my eyes at them, teased them, cried for and with them...  I've been human with them, because they are human too.  They are not automatons, killing machines, shells of humanity or ignorant brutes with no other prospects.  They are typical-in-most-ways human beings, as complex and varied as those working in the office tower downtown. 

Politics hovered over the director's Q&A afterwards, its malevolent presence threatening to break out with every question and every response.  It didn't have to be said explicitly (and wasn't) for me to realize how many people in that theater saw military support as a Democrat vs. Republican issue, and for it to pain me to my core.  The civilians who attended it were clearly there because of politics, and you could spot the couples from a local Republican stronghold after just one sentence with them

There was a chilling moment when one questioner (a civilian self-admittedly obsessed with using war movies to help her understand her late father's service in Vietnam) mistook what the rest of saw as "veiling or distance-creating" for "empty eyes" deadened by "being trained to be a killer and then doing what they were trained for."  My heart contracted, and then I wished I could somehow expand it to cover and protect the line of young Marines sitting in front of me who seemed to visibly shrink down into their seats.  They didn't need my protection, of course, but I wanted to lash out at the questioner's stupidity.  Fortunately one of the Marines featured in the movie was taking questions, and took the opportunity to point out that often that "deadness" is a "veil we put on to protect others when they ask what we do and we really don't want to lay it all on them, don't want to tell them the awful parts."

The whole experience had another effect on me, too.  As happens frequently these days, it just added another layer of my intensity of hatred for war, for what it puts us all through--the service members, their families, and our very society.

I've been in a bit of a funk lately, so take this all for what it's worth, but my thoughts were thus as I drove home:  One segment of America is either living or watching Brothers at War; the rest of America finds entertainment in a mocking of protective self-sacrifice, doesn't realize we still have at least 160,000 troops in combat zones, and thinks soldiers and Marines are cold-blooded automatons.  And if that weren't bad enough, an observer could easily be led to the (ERRONEOUS) conclusion that the divide breaks along political party lines.

And you know what scares/upsets me the most?  While still wrong, that error seems just a little bit closer to the truth than it used to be.

Brothers at War is continuing to open at other locations.  Details here.  I can't overstate how important it I think it is to get people--especially civilians with no/little connection to the military--to see this movie.