| Wednesday, February 23, 2005 |
08:56 - Based on a true story
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I wonder if anyone in Hollywood has the will to make a movie that goes as follows:
It's about the Iraq war and the campaign against the insurgency. It follows a unit of Marine Infantry through some of the more redoubtable towns as they try to take out the resistance while upholding the insane level of untouchability our military these days applies to certain "noncombatant" structures like hospitals, schools, and mosques and to differentiate between armed enemies and the civilians they were so often disguised as. A segment of the movie, about half an hour long, follows the unit through some particularly tough neighborhood in, say, Fallujah; Black Hawk Down-style, it observes as the men go house to house, breaking down doors, taking sniper fire from rooftops, chasing RPG-bearing insurgents down alleyways, and losing men in the process, not least because of the extreme precautions taken not to engage mosques and schools, even though those buildings are being audaciously used by the insurgents as weapons depots and sniper nests and gathering and staging locations. No matter, they're untouchable.
Finally, at the end of the day, the area is cleaned out and secure, and through superhuman effort (and the sacrifice of a dozen or more soldiers), the local mosques survived with only a few chips in the mortar.
Back at the forward base, the unit tiredly congratulates itself for a job well done, and yet the mood is somber because of the losses they took, the men they lost because they took risks they wouldn't otherwise have taken in order to minimize the impact on the civilian infrastructure which they'd committed to protecting even though the Geneva Conventions no longer applied. But it was worth it, surely.
Then they get a CARE package from home, a shipment of letters from grade school students. Oh good! The mood lightens. The perfect end to a wearying but rewarding day, right?
Pfc. Rob Jacobs of New Jersey said he was initially ecstatic to get a package of letters from sixth-graders at JHS 51 in Park Slope last month at his base 10 miles from the North Korea border.
That changed when he opened the envelope and found missives strewn with politically charged rhetoric, vicious accusations and demoralizing predictions that only a handful of soldiers would leave the Iraq war alive.
“It’s hard enough for soldiers to deal with being away from their families, they don’t need to be getting letters like this,” Jacobs, 20, said in a phone interview from his base at Camp Casey. “If they don’t have anything nice to say, they might as well not say anything at all.”
One Muslim boy wrote: “Even thoe [sic] you are risking your life for our country, have you seen how many civilians you or some other soldier killed?”
His letter, which was stamped with a smiley face, went on: “I know your [sic] trying to save our country and kill the terrorists but you are also destroying holy places like Mosques.”
Makes it all worthwhile, doesn't it?
Oh, how I would love to see that scene on the big screen. Any big-time producers in the audience?
UPDATE: Especially if it has this scene in it.
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Brian Tiemann
