It always seems that, at some point, we all encounter the prevailing sentiment that our service men and women are heroes. A hero is a “man of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds and noble qualities.” Dispensing with whatever patriarchal sentiment dictionary.reference.com may possess, it’s hard for me to accept that anyone who joins the military must be praiseworthy, noble, brave, etc. After all, they’re there to protect our freedom, right?

One of my favorite war films, which you may or may not have seen mentioned in Stahl’s recent class reading “Why We Support the Troops.” Fundamentally, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket is not one but two movies, each detailing a different aspect of wartime. First, and in my humble opinion most memorably, is the boot camp film, which follows a group of trainees being steadily turned from wide-eyed, naive boys to cold, remorseless killing machines.

The Vietnam War marked a significant point in which depictions of war became far less heroic, far more brutal and real. As the first televised war, Vietnam brought us brutal images of slaughters at My Lai, the execution of helpless prisoners of war, and the deplorable conditions of the native populace. Americans watched as the death toll climbed higher, and the images became more graphic still, gradually stirring their discomfort with the war. Full Metal Jacket gives us some perspective on what might lead to atrocities such as these.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KweLgf58R8

The movie begins with this quite somber scene, playing a very soft song to the image of future Marines being shaved before arriving for service. The focus in each cut is the facial expressions of each man: sad, resolved, blissfully unaware, even in shock, they come in all kinds. Above all, I can easily see the feeling captured in this scene, and it was likely that of many of the men chosen to serve in the war. The tune is low, somber, sad, but also seemingly at peace. Many future soldiers were likely devastated as they were chosen to fight, but ended up taking time, weighing consequences, and accepting their fate. This feeling can be further elucidated when one listens to the lyrics themselves: “America has heard the bugle call / And you know it involves us one and all. / I don’t suppose that war will ever yield / There’s fighting that will break us up again.” Heavy stuff, and it’s only a taste.

The boot camp scenes in this film don’t hold back at all. We hear every second of the brutal, mocking, vaguely southern drawl of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (pictured above) as he shoves these unwilling recruits through exercise after exercise. Our characters react in different ways to the training. Private Joker, named such for insulting the Sergeant in the first scene, is more or less the film’s protagonist. Throughout, he passively accepts the realities around him, seemingly going along with all the violence and mental conditioning while secretly believing that it’s all bullshit. Many of his straight-faced statements appear as if they couldn’t possibly be anything but satirical. In an interview during the war scenes, he says: “I wanted to see exotic Vietnam, the jewel of southeast Asia. I wanted to meet interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture and… kill them. I wanted to be the first kid on my block to get a confirmed kill.”

The satiric nature of this statement is pretty obvious. Being the “first kid on my block” to do something refers to the prevailing consumerist sentiment, wanting to have “more” than those around you. In this case, he twists it to being about violence and death, perhaps saying something about some possible motivations for joining in the war. Others are not so introspective.

When they actually enter the war, our members of Marine Corps boot camp encounter some people who learned the lessons of becoming killers a little too well. One particularly infamous scene from the movie, though only a few minutes long. Joker and his new friend Rafterman have to ride in a helicopter with machine gunner on the door who yells “Get some!” while firing at random civilians for no apparent reason. He gloats about all of his “dead gooks killed.” Joker asks if he killed women and children, to which he responds: “Sometimes.” When Joker asks him “How could you shoot women, and children?” Finally, he responds almost jokingly: “Easy, you just don’t lead ’em so much! *laughter* Ain’t war hell?”

Another, more long-lasting character, called Animal Mother, had similar nihilistic professions to make. As they all pay their last respects to a dead comrade, one man says: “At least they died for a good cause.” AM responds: “What cause was that?” “Freedom?” “Flush out your headgear, new guy. You think we waste gooks for freedom? This is a slaughter.”

What this tells me about war, or what it makes me think, is that some people can deal with the horrid things they have to do and see by removing the emotional impact behind it. Killing becomes not a horrible display of destructive force, but rather simply as something to be tolerated, accepted. There is no reason for it, there is no goal, there is just killing in the name of victory. I have to wonder how many troops actually think this way, and think of killing as an insignificant, everyday activity.

Returning to the point, about whether our troops are really heroes or not: It’s difficult to say. Kubrick’s portrayal definitely gives a message that not all of our troops are necessarily good people, or out to serve the cause of freedom and justice, but they definitely go through a lot to become what they are. Adversity can become a crucible that tests our resolve and virtue, but not all will pass the test unscathed.

Last week I use the War Diary to discuss my personal disconnection from war and conflict, and how some of our modern technology could be creating a similar distance even for those who serve our country. Call of Duty 4 provided us with a near-perfect example of disconnection: jaded gunship pilots raining death down from the skies in a manner that could only be described as apathetic, nonchalant. People had been reduced to dots on a screen, “hostile units” to be wiped out in black plumes of smoke, never to be seen again. It doesn’t take too long to wonder what it would be like to see the other end of the devastation. And what do you think happens to the pilots, as they lie awake at night, thinking about all the human life they’ve tragically snuffed out? Luckily, I’m not the first person to ask this question, as Spec Ops: The Line gives us warfare on both ends: physical devastation on one hand, and mental degeneration on the other.

Make sure you’re ready before you click on this image. It will be disturbing.

Give the image a click and you’ll see probably the game’s most chilling scene. To give you some background: You play as Captain Walker, a Delta Force agent sent into storm-shattered Dubai on a search for survivors from a missing United States Infantry unit known as the Damned 33rd. When you arrive, however, you discover things are worse than you could have imagined. Armed looters run around almost entirely unchecked, survivors struggle to eke out even the barest existence, and the 33rd sustains its power through a brutal rule, disconnected from accountability to the United States government. Why Walker and his companions remain in Dubai after the conclusion of their mission is not an easy question to answer, but their restless journey will take them through the very heart of darkness.

What I love so much about Spec Ops: The Line is that it does not merely talk the talk of being an anti-war game, it walks the walk. Call of Duty gives us some intense combat, and a perhaps satirical jab here and there, but Spec Ops takes us down into the dirt and shows us violence in a pure, unsaturated form, so much that its horror becomes self-evident. The devastation we wreak is not just left to our imagination, it’s right in front of us: We have to wade through the burned out husks we’ve made of what were once honorable men with families, friends, personalities, lives of their own. There are also attempts made to humanize the enemy soldiers, such as through the casual conversations we see them having while not in combat. It truly makes them appear like they are human beings rather than merely obstacles.

This is not to even touch on the cruel irony of it all: The same civilian lives your trip to The Gate was meant to save end up destroyed instead. Violence waged ostensibly in their defense was the very violence that destroyed them. No matter how we try to justify it This horrid image reminds me of the quandary I’ve always experienced when trying to figure out if I support a war: Can the measures we take to defend ourselves distort what we are, to the point that we are no longer worth defending?

But this is only one half of what Spec Ops looks into. The destruction, as it turns out, works both ways. The three Delta Force operators who enter Dubai on a simple mission start as wise-cracking, friendly, and duty-bound, but end up in a much worse state. As Captain Walker gains more and more scars from battle, his mental deterioration and that of his crew fully on display as well. Their yells of “Reloading!” or “Take out that sniper!” become “God-dammit I’m out!” or “Get this motherfucker off me!” The strain in their voices increases, and they begin to bicker between themselves.

Spec Ops has almost single-handedly changed the way I look at violence in any kind of medium. Instead of just numbly beholding it, I have to wonder what is going on behind the cold eyes of our protagonists and antagonists, how these characters think of the lives they are snuffing out. I even look further, into myself, and how much these pornographic images of violence are distorting even my views of the human condition and the value of human life. Maybe the sheer naked force of violence corrupts all that it touches, a mindless destruction that should be avoided at all costs, and corrupts even that which attempts to justify its use. In a way, Spec Ops depressed me, but I feel like the narrative experience and subsequent discussion regarding this game has helped me grow as a person, and look at violence in a worse way.

You may view it as sad, that it took a video game to do such a thing, but whatever the change might be, I’m given to looking at war in an entirely different manner now. It feels strange, but I think I might be closer to the truth of what I should feel.

So, I unfortunately wasn’t able to take my own video for this one, since I didn’t want to play Call of Duty 4 up to this point again, and all the workarounds I tried didn’t work, so instead credit goes to syoun678 on Youtube for this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAscuD4loh8

If you would be so kind as to watch (please do so because it’s kinda crucial to the subject of this post), take note of the responses you hear in the background while you’re gunning down all those little man-shaped dots on the ground. “Hot damn!” “Enemy personnel on the road.”  “Copy, smoke ’em.” ‘Ka-boom.”

If you were curious, this is what an AC130 Gunship looks like.

When I played this game at first, this was one of the most striking scenes for me, because it’s just so much like… a video game. Weird, huh? Anyway, what I mean by that is that you’re so unbelievably detached from the fighting compared with the rest of the game. While the visuals aren’t entirely photo-realistic, they give good enough approximations of human beings for you to be fighting, but not here. Now all you have is a bunch of tiny black dots on the ground, and little plumes of smoke come up when you click that make them go flying in all directions… And the chatter from all the men on the radio makes it sound like they’re playing a fun video game as well, or at least one that’s not too engaging. The sheer lack of interest, even amusement at all the little plumes of dust, which coincidentally happen to contain within them the shattered remains of what was once a unique, irreplaceable human being, is a tad chilling when you think about it.

I suppose what I’m getting at here is that in my personal estimation, war is a far away thing. I could never imagine what it would be like to be one of those horrified souls who, with death raining down from the skies, has the whole of his life flashing before his eyes. I also can’t imagine what it would be like to stare another man (or a woman!) down knowing that we both want to kill eachother for reasons that are equally ingrained in both of us. What technology seems to have done is make for us a war that requires neither of those things, where one can just sit in the relative comfort of a gunship thousands of feet in the air and rain death down on helpless specks that hardly resemble human beings. (While I personally doubt that the interface is exactly as simple as Call of Duty 4 makes it out to be, I can’t see operating an unmanned predator drone as being any more humanizing than that.)

Also, in a larger societal context, I have not contributed at all to the war effort. I haven’t saved fuel, food, water, electricity, or anything else to conserve it for future military use, as was required in World War II and others. I go about my daily life almost completely oblivious to the fact that there are people fighting and dying half a world away (some would say “for my freedom”) who lived in my country, said the same pledge to the flag, felt the chill go down their spine when terrorists destroyed the World Trade Centers. As I believe we mentioned in class, war is now something the populace merely has to tolerate a war, not actively participate and condone it. This very much disturbs me, and I think I should be fighting harder to make sure that wars waged partly in my name are truly justified, and doing whatever I can to change the minds of those who disagree with me. After all, this is life and death we’re talking about, isn’t it?

This gets me thinking that perhaps even some of the members of our own armed forces have this distance from war and conflict. After all, delivering radio signals from thousands of miles away is hardly what you’d call intimate involvement with a conflict. What goes through a person’s head when they order a missile strike that will undoubtedly kill people? Does it even feel real?

I guess where I’m going with all of this is that we may need a lesson in empathy. When I think about the fire bombs used on Japan in World War II, the mass devastation they caused, the hundreds of thousands of lives they took and the millions they left without homes, I think about the technological genius that must have gone into crafting such a weapon. Instead, what I should be thinking about, is what a horrid waste of genius this is, how world-shattering it must have been to see fire falling from the very air, to desperately try to put out a flame that could not be stopped, that was burning everything I had on this Earth, to slowly gasp for air after realizing too late that the inferno took my life’s breath away.

Honestly, I don’t know what the solution is. Perhaps if we all had perfect empathy, most of us wouldn’t be able to go to war. I don’t know about anyone else, but that suits my purposes just fine.