The movie about Afghanistan that Hollywood won’t make has been sketched out in the imagination of Andrew Klavan. After criticizing Hollywood for making only films critical of the U.S. (see previous post), Klavan decided to imbed with a unit in Afghanistan and get the true picture firsthand.
His account appears in City Journal: “Five Days at the End of the World.”
In the company of Major Rory, Lieutenant Baronner, and Sergeant Mitchell, the place comes alive. Klavan tells of physical discomfort, corruption, ambushes, and geography so bleak, foreboding, and isolated that “It’s poignantly easy to imagine Jesus walking the fallen world below while the United States Air Force patrols it from above.”
And worse. “Afghanistan’s in the thirteenth century, but this place was Paleozoic,” Rory told me later. “If a T. rex walked out from behind a hill and growled at us, it wouldn’t’ve fazed me at all.”
Rory resembles Alan Alda in the role of Hawkeye. But the characters for this movie are heroic.
So where are the dupes, the abusers, the kill-crazy crackpots who populate the armed forces in Hollywood’s ideology-driven depictions of the War on Terror? There are some somewhere, I’m sure. A small city’s worth of Americans are deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some are bound to go bad. But to tell only their stories amounts to a despicable slander-by-omission. These guys are the real guys. That Vietnam-era army of rueful, ill-educated draftees caught up in a conflict that they can’t comprehend is gone. This is a force of professional warriors, every single one of whom enlisted or reenlisted after 9/11, fully aware of what he was signing up for. Each has his complaints about the military, the war, and American foreign policy—who wouldn’t? But I met none who doubted that they were the spearhead of a force for good, a nation striving to do what was right in the world.
Once again, Rory spoke my showbiz thought: You could watch the most sentimental patriotic war film from the forties or fifties, he said, and get a more accurate picture of who these soldiers are than you get from more “realistic” Hollywood movies today.
Perhaps, if you leave out the dance numbers with Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. Lt. Baronner earned low marks for his West Side Story rendition. But portrayals of ordinary people performing honorably would fit – ordinary people in a situation of life or death wondering who they could trust.
That would be the theme, see: the frustrations of building goodwill in wartime. Because goodwill is the key to this multifront counterinsurgency. It’s the only way to win the locals away from the brutal scum who’ve enslaved them in the past and over to some semblance of liberty and the rule of law. That’s why Information Operations—what they used to call propaganda—is so important. That’s why the bad guys work so hard to spread lies about us.
And that’s why Hollywood should maybe try not to help them.
Comments on this entry are closed.