David and Goliath in Iraq
By
Saul Landau Read Spanish Version
“In
the Valley of Elah” has Hollywood relying on cell phone images from
Iraq that Mike Deerfield sent to his father via
email.
Despite the amateur sound and picture quality, we discern armed
soldiers riding in a vehicle, the sounds of cursing, a man screaming
in pain and others laughing. A still photo shows a burned out VW bus,
a dead body and group of young boys running toward camera in a
Baghdad neighborhood. The clues for a mystery!
What
happened to retired MP Sergeant (Tommy Lee Jones) Hank Deerfield’s
son, Mike? This frozen digital instant in time and the audio visual
records of early 21st
Century warfare might also provide future anthropologists with some
idea of the lunacy of our time.
Mike
sent his Dad these cell-phone videos that show in blurry, sometimes
semi audible form how the Iraq war has drained the soldiers’
empathy. The young men just back from Iraq look normal, act politely
and courteously — a facade covering
their
semi psychotic, drug addicted selves. Indeed, the film shows that
Iraq has destroyed the psychic integrity of those young people who
served there. That conclusion should become grounds for declaring a
state of larger political and cultural distress.
The
older Deerfield, a Vietnam vet and now a gravel hauler, retains his
military police discipline. He travels
to an
army base in New Mexico to find his son AWOL shortly after returning
from Iraq. His character remains military: he shines his shoes,
presses his trousers and makes his bed military fashion. This
stubborn racist, determined to find his son, remains confident that
his beloved military will help him.
En
route,
he shows a Salvadoran groundskeeper the proper way to fly the
American flag — fly it upside down only to show distress, a call for
help.
Mike
had telephones from Iraq: “Get me out of here,” in tears,
he
pleaded
with his Dad. The pain flashes on the sergeant’s face. He mutters a
cliché. “Stay safe.” The helpless father hopes his son
“will get over it” — the stress of combat.
American
grit means: Your country calls; you serve. I’ve met Sgt. Deerfield
in bars, at ball games and airports. I’ve had him in my classes at
universities. His religious loyalty remained an article of faith,
until Iraq. When the President calls, you don’t question legalities
and procedures. You serve — even after the trauma of Vietnam, when a
lot of Deerfields returned bitter. “They [the politicians] didn’t
let us win,” is the refrain, still heard on right wing talk shows
referring to the lack of political will — as if winning was a
possibility.
Iraq,
like Vietnam, doesn’t relate to courage and valor; or defending
“our country.” How many veterans have now asked: did the United
States have a legal or moral reason to intervene?
Some
soldiers still justify their behavior by referring to “obeying
orders,” but only the most dense and dogmatic actually talk
seriously about either conflict as bringing democracy or freedom to
these lands.
We
know what happens to young men and women who kill innocent people,
including small children, when the actual rules of daily engagement
condone the murder of such innocents under the guise of
self-protection.
After
Vietnam, many who returned physically whole suffered from severe
mental gaps, not just difficult periods of adjustment but permanent
disabilities that left them homeless and perhaps psychotic.
Mike’s
emailed images and the subsequent testimony of his former comrades
provide the craggy faced Deerfield with meager clues to such
psychosis. In the barracks the men in his son’s unit show him
deference and respect, address him as sir — as they pathologically
lie
The
mystery of Mike being AWOL gets solved when Mike’s dismembered and
charred body parts are found. In trying to learn why Mike was killed,
Hank delves ever deeper into the reality Mike had just experienced.
The unrelenting and nameless roadside bombs have changed the face of
even the war rules for a Vietnam style engagement. Orders given
override basic humanity. For survival, “do not stop” to avoid a
young boy retrieving his soccer ball in the road. Like Vietnam, every
civilian, even children, that we have come to show the light of
democracy must loom as a potential threat to individual soldiers’
lives.
We
have seen TV images of wounded youth without arms, legs, eyes, brain
function, getting “rehab” in Walter Reed hospital. But it makes
no sense. The people we’re supposedly helping plant improvised
incendiary devices to kill and maim the helpers? How does the lethal
response of Iraqis mix with the religious credo inside the honorable
souls of the men and women who have gone there “to serve”? Not
all these youngsters were like Jessica Lynch, who enlisted “because
I couldn’t get a job at Walmart?”
Mike,
for example, wanted to show his father that he too could serve like a
man. But something went wrong. The film slowly amasses evidence about
Mike’s death and the nature of how Iraq has altered the nature of
the soldiers. Outwardly, their voices sounded normal, replete with
the mandatory “sir” added to the end of sentences. Their erect
body postures showed their military training: toughness and poise.
Americans don’t show weakness even under extreme stress.
After
serving in Iraq, however, the men fall apart. Hank has not yet
grasped the significance of his son’s death. He still clings to the
notion of soldiering as serving, of courage as conquering fear. It
doesn’t allow him to ask the right questions about who murdered his
boy or what motives the killer might have had. But as a former
military policeman he knows how to ask, look, listen, and learn from
the men in Mike’s unit. But he still doesn’t show any curiosity
about why the United States with its humongous technological
superiority and brave soldiers hasn’t won a real war since WWII?
(Gulf War I was a technological massacre).
Does
the clue for the larger mystery lie in the film’s title, “In the
Valley of Elah,” the place where David transcended fear to
accomplish the unthinkable?
Does
this biblical story that Hank relates to the young son of a
sympathetic police detective at bedtime relate to the meaning of
courage in the Iraq War context? Is the new Goliath the war machine
itself with tens of thousands of factories and contractors 435
congressional districts that feeds
the
local and national economies? Few politicians dare confront it with a
weapon as simple as a stone and slingshot: the truth?
Other
than non-front runners Ron Paul, Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich,
the
presidential aspirants salute the bloated military, which did not win
wars in Korea, Vietnam, where millions of Davids confronted the
technological Goliath with far cruder weapons and forced the United
States to withdraw. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the Resistance has
driven U.S. politics into a tizzy.
By
its nature, war drives people into irrational states — even after
the battles are over. Like many a grieving parent, Hank, too, begins
to lose his grip
as he
stops thinking like a detective and vents his anger with racist
language on a Mexican-American from Mike’s unit.
He
actually cuts himself while shaving. His wife (Susan Sarandon) blames
him for taking away both her sons. The other also died in military
service — and, on top of this, there’s guilt. Hank substituted
machismo for compassion when Mike desperately needed him. Now the
stoic, grieving father, must fight the military bureaucrats — and
police “rules” — to get answers. He keeps looking at the
fragments of video and the still photo as it dawns on him that the
damage done to those who served in Iraq cannot be repaired.
The
chaotic fragments of jiggly cell phone video — unusual in Hollywood
films, noted for careful composition — challenge the audience
aesthetically as well as politically. How do you extract meaning from
visual and audio chaos?
“In
the Valley of Elah” offers no answers, other than the Iraq war has
permanently altered U.S. politics. Hank’s innate sense of country
right or wrong and soldiers as noble erodes with the understanding of
what happened to his son and his son’s killers. The facts of murder
lead him to distrust the institution with which he has identified.
Each
member of Mike’s unit has become a killer, drug addict, patron of
sleazy sex bars. All have become pathological liars; his own son
turned into a sadist in Iraq. “In the Valley of Elah” is about
the changing nature of American axioms — we are good, our cause is
noble, to serve in the military brings honor to the family.
Like
the Vietnam veterans — alas, did we really need another lesson?
— the
soldiers returning from Iraq also suffer from post-traumatic stress.
Some have committed horrible crimes.
Mike
disobeyed orders after committing an unthinkable act which his
superior ordered. He stopped his vehicle, got out and photographed
the scene where he lost his soul — in the service of his country.
Saul
Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow. His new book is A
BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD.
His new film is WE
DON’T PLAY GOLF HERE,
on DVD from roundworldproductions@gmail.com
