Reviewing Movies

But for the fact that Sebastian Junger and Ted Hetherington spent a year embedded with these troops their mission to Korangal Valley in Afghanistan would be just another in which troops were deployed to a location that was later abandoned without comment. The movie serves to put faces to the characters I read about in Junger’s book War. Faces that on screen appear in extreme close-up. Modern warfare is conducted at extreme distance with ammo that can cause injury and death even when it misses you. The enemy is an impersonal entity unless you are the one being shot at or you see him in the sights of your weapon. Soldiers don’t so much fight for a cause but in support of the members of their unit.

This movie is more about the warriors than the war they fought. We see close-ups of weapons being fired but get little sense of the enemy they are aiming at, probably true to the actual situation the troops faced. What is brought home to the viewer are the spartan conditions which the troops have to live in, the pallet of bottled water wrapped in netting was obviously heloed in as was everything else they use. New arrivals labour up steep slopes with heavy packs; cartons of cigarettes and a collapsible camp chair being prized items humped in at great personal cost.

This is one movie where the DVD supplements are more useful than the actual feature. The Deleted Scenes show us more than the actual movie itself. We also get to meet each of the soldiers and hear about their lives post-mission. Young men go to war, to this 60-year-old seeming boys. The individual who gets the most screen time looks barely out of his teens. Although the movie makes no comment about politics, military objectives or moral judgments there is no missing the message that lives were lost and ruined for an objective that was later abandoned. The effectiveness of the hearts and minds campaign was vividly demonstrated by the yawn of the elder who like his ancestors before him has heard it all before. Gungho whipper-snappers come and go but the people who live there have to endure. The Taliban own the territory and collaboration with the American infidels will result in retaliation.

Is the trauma inflicted on the men sent to these theatres of war worth the cost in lives lost, families orphaned, and lives forever traumatized? It seems clear that even the men who didn’t suffer physical wounds will need care of some kind for the remaining 60 years of their natural lives if they manage to survive the nightmares they brought home with them. If this movie does nothing else it makes dramatically clear the true cost of war. The armchair politicians and generals who send boys to war should have this as required viewing, but why should reality interfere with policy.