Home of the Brave and the Unsaved

Somewhere I have read that, perhaps in Los Angeles, perhaps in New York City, perhaps in a luxury hotel or some edifice of that sort where lots of film-making folk tend to aggregate, the U.S. military maintains a full set of facilities whose purpose is to furnish film makers with every sort of military props and whatever other such resources they might need to shoot all films that have military content. The purpose is to make sure that every such film is fully in accord with the military's message. And widespread use is indeed made of this "help."

A few days ago on the dish I saw "Home of the Brave," a recent flick starring Samuel L. Jackson. It covers several U.S. soldiers who find out that in just a couple of weeks they are to be sent back home from the continuing hostilities in Iraq. Most don't closely know each other, though they have seen each other around. They happen to become members of a convoy that on a humanitarian mission ventures outside their protected zone and gets trapped inside a town. In the ensuing battle the characters endure losses of friends and various injuries to their physical and mental beings, which persist and add to their difficulties while they are trying to adjust to civilian life back in the U.S.

The film was well made and did a good job of portraying the pain and anguish of those difficulties, but I felt that it was still a massive failure, because, despite the damage inflicted by the fighting on the characters, it was an openly pro-war film, to the point of of portraying the Iraq thing as a matter pertaining only to U.S. servicemen and no others, especially not the millions of Iraqis who had been killed, displaced, imprisoned, impoverished, and otherwise harmed in thousands of different ways.

What is the point of showing how an activity is responsible for so much grief, yet is so necessary and honorable? How can war be both? I would think that for millennia already, since longer even than the days of "Lysistrata," the answer is that it can't be. And, providing that there are degrees of such things, the Iraqi invasion and occupation has been an especially dishonorable and obscene instance of that undertaking.

There is only one scene in the film in which some counterpoint is made to the prevailing pro-war theme, and that is when the sterotypically resentful, rebellious son of the Jackson character makes an anti-war argument that, though comprehensive within the time permitted to it, lasts all of two minutes. Otherwise the returned soldiers never address the root causes, in their own minds and in talks with others, of the effort that led to them being sent to Iraq and to be scarred there, undoubtedly for life. The Jackson character brusquely tells his son that he was "defending his country," without taking a second to say how.

Instead you get such scenes as when one character is telling another of how he likes to look at the History Channel, especially scenes showing World War 2 and its aftermath. He speaks of how in many French towns there are statues commemorating Eisenhower and other foreign generals who headed the armies that liberated those places. (I wonder if, in those places, there are any of Marshal Zhukov?) And these Iraq veterans seem somewhat buoyed as they speculate that in 20 years time there may well be statues in Iraq towns of their "liberators" as well.

The mind recoils at the thought of statues of G.W. Bush or General Petraeus ever being erected and celebrated in Baghdad, Mosul, or Basra. But the film is at pains to dismiss the views of such doubters and detractors, by repeating in a variety of ways the message that the military seems to consider overwhelming to all other reasoning: "You were not there and you don't know."