Operation Homecoming, directed by former ABC newsman
Richard E. Robbins, comes to us as a product of the National
Endowment for the Arts which, under chairman Dana Gioia, must have
thought that it would be both patriotic and artistic to have
soldiers returning from Iraq try their hand at creative writing in
order to express what they saw and felt there. Whatever may have
been the wisdom of that idea in the first place, it can’t be denied
that there are some problems with converting the product of their
labors into a movie which is essentially a collection of talking
heads with illustrations.
Sometimes the illustrations are montages of still photos, or
file footage of soldiers marching or relaxing or fighting.
Sometimes they are drawings. In one case they are shots of the
scenes of where a dead Marine’s funeral will take, or has taken,
place, though not of the funeral itself. Sometimes the talking
heads are invisible, as when Hollywood actors like Robert Duvall,
Beau Bridges or Aaron Eckhart read the writings of the guys who are
on camera. But always it’s the words, the “writing,” that holds the
center stage.
There is a kind of inertness to the whole idea of “writing”
which is only accentuated by the fact that you can’t help noticing
what’s missing, which is the political context of the war. So much
re-told suffering means that the movie constantly teeters on the
brink of being anti-war, but it never allows itself to tip over in
that direction — which must have been the price of winning the
cooperation both of the NEA and of the Pentagon. Yet on the whole,
I think, I’d have preferred it if someone had been allowed to say
what many must be thinking, namely that all the suffering, both
physical and psychic, on display here is unnecessary. That’s the
usual subtext in similar accounts of the horror of war: to make it
go away, all you have to do is not fight. I think that
this is pacifist wishful-thinking, but at least, if someone had
said it, someone else might have said the opposite, that these are
necessary sacrifices.
For that idea is also left out. One of the talking heads,
Sergeant John McCary, does say that we have to keep faith with the
fallen by seeing the thing through to the end, but it’s not clear
that that’s the same thing. And others who must be against seeing
it through to the end are forced to be less direct about it. To me,
the result looks more like a commercial than a conventional movie
documentary: a commercial, perhaps, for the humanity and the
compassion and the sensitivity of those whom some of us might
otherwise — it is more than hinted — be tempted to think of as
unfeeling brutes and killing machines. As I did not need to be
persuaded that American soldiers are proper human beings with the
full complement of finer feelings, I occasionally found myself
getting a bit impatient with the movie.
I had already heard, too, and more than once, that soldiers in
combat are both terribly afraid and terribly exhilarated; that they
feel very keenly grief at the deaths of their comrades and remorse
when, unintentionally, they are responsible for civilian deaths;
that they experience both mind-numbing boredom and heart-piercing
terror and that they fight more for each other, and to be allowed
to go home, than they do for abstract ideas like freedom or
democracy. Above all, I have heard again and again that, in battle,
men just naturally revert to a form of savagery. “So much for honor
and fair play; so much for the ancient warrior codes. Die,
m**********, die!” It’s not that I doubt any of these things; it
just might have been nice to hear somebody speak up for honor and
fair play for a change.
But you know that’s not going to happen. Any time you
put “art” or “writing” together with war you get — at least
implicitly — anti-war propaganda. That’s because art, to us, means
seeing things in terms of their emotional immediacy and taken out
of any political context. And without its political context, war is
mere butchery. Kudos to the film-makers for being fairly discreet
about this, but it is still the subtext of their work. The best way
to look at the uniformity and complementarity of viewpoint of the
movie is in terms of ritual. We listen to the repetition of some
kinds of familiar ideas over and over again not to receive
information from them but to pay our respects to those who have
first uttered them and made them a part of our mental
furniture.
In this case, our respects are being paid to the sacrifices of
all soldiers as we listen to some of them try to make sense of
their experience of war by telling how they felt about it at the
time. It’s no more news than the liturgy is in church, but there is
some value in listening to it anyway.
Also like the liturgy, the war-narrative is thought to be
appropriately dressed up in fine language. One turn of phrase I
particularly liked was: “I been at the beach now for a week, and I
can’t find the ocean.” It’s the nearest thing we get to a joke, and
it makes us realize that black humor is the other thing that’s
missing here. Once again, a reverent hush descends on the
proceedings. Not that I’m complaining. As someone in Operation
Homecoming says: “There’s a false notion that we all ought to
recover from everything….There’s something to be said for
remembering and not healing.”
James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and
Public Policy Center, media essayist for the New
Criterion, and The American Spectator’s movie critic.
He is the author of the recent book, Honor: A History (Encounter
Books).
