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Last Updated: Jul 21, 2008 - 9:48:08 AM |
Before my friend, Army major Rory Aylward, left for Afghanistan at the
end of February, he invited me down to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to
watch the final stage of his training. The “Capstone exercises” were to
be a week of staged maneuvers set in “FOB Patriot,” an imaginary
Forward Operating Base in Central Asia. “Theater immersion,” the Army
calls it. The soldiers, sailors, and airmen involved refer to it
mordantly as Braggistan.
I was eager to attend. I had just finished an essay for City Journal on
the latest spate of Hollywood antiwar films (see “The Lost Art of War,”
Winter 2008). I was appalled by them and, as an occasional screenwriter
myself, ashamed of the industry. The movie business has produced and is
still producing a steady stream of petulant, we-are-the-enemy
propaganda pieces—including Redacted, Lions for Lambs, and In the
Valley of Elah—that portray those who wear the “uniforms that guard you
while you sleep” as brutal abusers, naive cannon fodder, or
shell-shocked and murderous maniacs. I wanted to go to Braggistan to
pay tribute to Rory and his colleagues and to let them know that there
are still some people in the entertainment world grateful to them for
keeping our artsy carcasses safe from the madcap slaves of Allah.
Plus, it sounded as though it might be fun—which it was, kind of.
Rory is part of a PRT, or Provincial Reconstruction Team, made up of
about 90 active and reservist servicemen, as well as a few civilians.
They’re being deployed in Afghanistan to try to help build a civil
society there in the after-wreckage of the Taliban. This culminating
week of training, under the auspices of the 189th Brigade of the First
Army Division East, consisted of improvisational role playing:
unscripted meetings between PRT officers and actors doing their best
impersonations of local mullahs.
It was nothing if not amusing to watch the team’s leader, Commander
George Perez—a highly intelligent but plainspoken Navy submariner who
looked as though he’d be more comfortable solving his problems with a
torpedo—try to master the art of sensitive intercultural negotiations
(for which, it turned out, he had a genuine talent). More amusing
still, training planners often interrupted the scenarios with
unannounced “injects”—simulated sudden dangers meant to represent the
perils of the real Afghanistan. Thus I found myself bouncing over muddy
forest roads in Humvees with fake IEDs exploding on every side; dodging
mock sniper fire in cinderblock-and-plywood villages; and running here
and there in “full battle rattle”—some 40 pounds of body armor—which,
for a man my age, had a certain hernial hilarity all its own.
But jolly as all this may be when the bullets aren’t real, I found
something truly disconcerting about making the transition from
Hollywood to FOB Patriot—I mean, from one exercise in make-believe to
another. I couldn’t help noticing that we—we of the cultural classes—do
make-believe better than the people who live and fight in the real
world.
I kept thinking back to all those antimilitary movies I’d seen and to
left-wing journals like the New York Times, which consistently
highlight military abuses and failures while obscuring and downplaying
military heroism and advances. The servicemen I was training with were
clearly smart, expert, and committed to excellence in the defense of
their country. They also seemed a lot more mentally stable than most of
the screenwriters, journalists, and academics I know, though that’s not
saying much. Yet Hollywood and our left-wing media, as well as our
antimilitary professoriate, can be quite convincing when, say, they
portray an isolated injustice like Abu Ghraib as evidence of systemic
atrocity, or depict veterans as more likely to commit crimes than the
rest of us, which statistically they’re not. Conversely, as spectacular
as our armed forces are at the business of ousting real-life tyrants,
they fall a little short when it comes to works of the imagination.
Take Braggistan itself. The trainees, especially those who’d actually
been to the wars, complained bitterly about the lack of realism there,
crowding around my Humvee at one point to tick off their grievances.
The injects—IEDs and snipers—were more typical of Iraq than
Afghanistan, they said, where you’re more likely to encounter rocket
fire from a distance. The vehicles, equipment, and accommodations
weren’t true to life. And a lot of the instructors had never been
“downrange” and so were teaching out of textbooks rather than from
experience. This is not to suggest that the warriors were poorly
trained. In fact, they’d been so well trained elsewhere that a fun-park
ride like the Capstone exercises struck many of them as irrelevant.
After one series of snafus turned a mock shura, or tribal consultation,
into a gunfight, a passing sergeant shrugged deadpan and drawled to me,
“We’re better when it’s live.”
Okay, so the Army isn’t Universal Studios. But the failures here are
symptomatic of a larger imaginative deficit. From its tongue-tied
commander in chief to its “information operations”—which even the
military admits are regularly outdone by al-Qaida propagandists—down to
the public-affairs people who deal with the local press, the military
has so far been incapable of putting its urgent mission into narrative
form. An insulated culture of taciturn heroism may work against them
here, but there’s also the usual governmental cluelessness about
dealing with the public. Even at Fort Bragg, when a sympathetic
journalist—namely me—tried to get permission to join the training, I
was at first given the sort of stone-faced runaround you usually
associate with the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Now you may say that capturing the imagination isn’t the job of our
fighting forces. But this is America, remember: we’re a country of the
imagination, a living state of mind. We’re not connected to one another
by bloodlines or any depth of native memory. We’re the descendants of
an idea that every generation has to learn to hold in its collective
consciousness. More than in any other country, it matters in America
who we think we are and what we believe we’re doing.
Our academies, the news media that train in the academies, and the
entertainment industry that’s informed by the news media have become,
to my thinking, a sort of alternative state of the imagination, a
kingdom of lies founded in the muck of hysterical guilt, historical
distortion, and philosophical solipsism. In their fantastic and
labyrinthine narrative, our fascist foes are Nemesis, the emanation of
our own sins, and therefore our military can only be the mad or foolish
servants of evil.
The real story is simpler, and it should be simple enough to tell:
we’re up against another generation of the ever-present enemies of the
American idea, and they have to be stopped by the sort of men and women
who are training at Fort Bragg.
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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