Mickey Z

Cool Observer

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Sunday, November 06, 2005

Don’t mind us…we’re just keeping the world safe for democracy

I saw Jarhead (http://tinyurl.com/d6uk4) on Friday. An anti-war war movie set during Operation Desert Storm, it de-romanticizes the life of a soldier and contains some brilliant, memorable images, e.g. oil fields burning, black clouds of smoke blotting out the sun, well fires the only light, and oil coming down like black rain.

Another powerful moment occurs when the protagonists happen upon rows and rows of vehicles that have been blow to bits by U.S. aircraft. Charred bodies everywhere.

Made me recall something I wrote in Seven Deadly Spins:

High above a swamp, over 60 miles of coastal Highway 8 from Kuwait to Iraq, a division of the Iraq’s Republican Guard withdrew on February 26-27,1991. Baghdad radio had just announced Iraq’s acceptance of a cease-fire proposal and, in compliance with UN Resolution 660, Iraqi troops were ordered to withdraw to positions held before August 2, 1990. President George H.W. Bush derisively called the announcement “an outrage” and “a cruel hoax.”

Even so, the exodus from Kuwait had begun…

“U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours,” says journalist Joyce Chediac. “It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” one U.S. pilot said.

Paul Sullivan is a combat veteran from Operation Desert Storm who went on to create the National Gulf War Resource Center. He described the so-called highway of death: “When you see the battlefield littered with dead bodies as far as you can see and there’s smoke swirling around, and the smell of the dead bodies, the ammunition, the fuel, the explosions; it’s very overpowering,” Sullivan said, describing “miles and miles and miles of charred trucks, tanks, blown up buildings, pieces of arms, pieces of legs every which way.”

Randall Richard of the Providence Journal filed this dispatch from the deck of the U.S.S. Ranger: “Air strikes against Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait were being launched so feverishly from this carrier today that pilots said they took whatever bombs happened to be closest to the flight deck. The crews, working to the strains of the Lone Ranger theme, often passed up the projectile of choice...because it took too long to load.”

“Every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments,” Chediac reported after visiting the scene. “No survivors are known or likely. The cabs of trucks were bombed so much that they were pushed into the ground, and it’s impossible to see if they contain drivers or not. Windshields were melted away, and huge tanks were reduced to shrapnel.”

“At one spot,” Bob Drogin reported in the Los Angeles Times, “snarling wild dogs (had) reduced two corpses to bare ribs. Giant carrion birds pick(ed) at another; only a bootclad foot and eyeless skull are recognizable.”

Back to Jarhead: I can’t help but worry that a movie like this could have two negative results. Audiences might miss the irony and end up cheering the carnage. Just as bad, people may leave the theater outraged...but channel that outrage into the lost cause of our two-party (sic) system.

Still, Hollywood should know we want more films like this...so why not vote with your dollar? I urge everyone to see Jarhead (and Good Night, and Good Luck, for that matter) and bring along someone who could use a…