If you are looking for a high quality viewing experience, I would recommend Shadow Company, which may be one of the best documentaries I have seen in years. Give it a look.
Good Flicks
by John Cole| 2 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Military, Movies
Demdude
And if you’re looking for a dark comedy that is vulgar, shallow and incredibly low brow, see “Little Miss Sunshine”. Laughed out loud at this movie.
SeesThroughIt
I saw The Ground Truth yesterday…pretty harrowing stuff. Three parts in particular jumped out at me:
1) Grunt recalling marching cadences they learned and used at boot camp. One of them was a charming ditty about capturing an enemy town, luring all the children into a schoolhouse, and then killing them all.
2) An 82nd Airborne medic talking about a patient he recieved in Afghanistian. He was repeatedly assured that the man was an Al-Qaeda bigwig. Furthermore, the man had been hung by his hands from a tree for three days. Both hands became gangrenous and had to be amputated. Then the Army said, “Whoops–wrong guy. Our bad!” and released him. So…what does everybody think that man’s opinion of the United States is now?
3) After returning home, a combat vet wanted to see a VA counselor about his PTSD. The counselor asked him what was wrong. He said, “I killed innocent people–women and children–in Iraq. I’m having trouble dealing with that.” The counselor told him that she couldn’t help him because he was a “conscientious objector.” Yes, admitting he had killed innocent people meant he forfeited the right to post-combat care.
I was constantly reminded of what my downstairs neighbor/Vietnam vet Bill says: “In the military, they tear you down and rebuild you as a soldier. So you go off and kill for a while, but then they don’t tear down the soldier and rebuild the person.”