War

Film Review: 1917

/ Peter Martuneac / 5 Comments

I don’t typically watch war movies these days. Since having participated in a war myself, such films have lost their sheen for me. I do make exceptions, however. I watched “12 Strong” because it’s probably the only blockbuster film about my war to be made and now I’ve seen the 2019 film “1917”.

This film, as you can probably guess from the title, is set during The Great War, aka World War I. There are just two main characters, two young British soldiers, Lance Corporals William Schofield and Thomas Blake, tasked with an impossible mission: carry a message across no-man’s-land, passing close to a German-occupied town, to a division that is about to stumble into a trap. A simple premise that is done beautifully.

Everything about this film was done well. The accompanying musical score directed by Thomas Newman was a perfect match, at times haunting and other times inspiring. There is also an a capelle rendition of the classic folk song “I am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger” towards the end, sung by a soldier to his silent comrades, that left me at a loss for words.

George Mackay and Dean-Charles Chapman are excellent in the roles as Schofield and Blake. They truly captured the spirit of two young men who daily live in fear of death but put a brave face over it, whether that be through humors, letters from home, or allowing themselves to be fully immersed in their work.

Benedict Cumberbatch also appears in the film briefly as Colonel Mackenzie. Though he is only on the screen for about two minutes, he runs away with the scene. It’s remarkable when an actor can suck the air out of the room in which the audience sits, even in a supporting role.

What truly elevated this film, however, is the manner in which it’s shot. There are no scene breaks, no POV changes, and no cuts. The film is a continuous, running shot. The effect of this method is astounding and a wholly new experience. Just one example, as Schofield and Blake approach a seemingly abandoned country house during their mission, they decide they must check the house for enemies.

In any other movie, here there would likely be a scene change, cutting to the young Lance Corporals suddenly on the porch of the house or kicking in the front door. Not in 1917. Here, once Schofield and Blake decide to advance on the house, you follow them literally every step of the way. Down the hill, around the pond, up the bank, and then over to the porch. It’s only about 18 seconds, but it’s 18 seconds of filming you would never see in an ordinary film.

Suffice it to say, I was fully immersed in this film. It takes you right down to the ground of a brutal land war, giving you a grunt’s-eye-view. There’s not too much violence in it; there’s a scene of somewhat unsavory hand-to-hand combat, but it takes place during the night and in a shadowed corner, sparing the viewer anything too gruesome.

And, of course, there is heart-wrenching loss. It’s painful to watch and impossible not to shed a tear.

As with other war movies, I will not watch this one again, but I’m very glad I saw it once. I highly recommend it to anyone who appreciates a new cinematic experience.

Book Review: “The Fifth Act” by Elliot Ackerman

/ Peter Martuneac / 5 Comments

I came to this book in a surprisingly roundabout and atypical way: a rabbit hole of Wikipedia articles. It started with checking out some recent edits on the page of my former battalion, the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, and eventually led to the page for Elliot Ackerman, himself a former Marine and now an author.

I perused the list of his books and immediately felt a call from The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan. That was my war, Elliot’s war; our war. I bookmarked the page so I’d remember to buy it once I inevitably received at least one Barnes & Noble gift card for Christmas.

Christmas came and I went to the store to pick it up the next day. I started reading it that night and couldn’t put it down. I finished it the very next morning, just an hour ago, in fact.

This is not a recounting of all the events leading up to the collapse of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to the Taliban, but more of a memoir. The author guides us through his involvement in the efforts made by US citizens and military veterans to evacuate Afghans who would almost certainly be murdered by the Taliban once the US completed its withdrawal.

Juxtaposed against these harrowing tales of fear, hope, and despair are the scenes of the author’s family vacation. While he was touring Italy with his wife and kids, Ackerman was furiously messaging and calling every contact he had and even folks he’d never met, trying to arrange safe evacuation for hundreds of people. It’s a jarring switch every time, to go from scenes of chaos and death to fancy dinners in Rome, but it highlights the absolute insanity of war and in particular this war as it drew to its close.

Ackerman also tells some stories of his time in Afghanistan as a Marine and later as a CIA paramilitary officer. He recalls a few missions, including times when friends fell in combat. These stories spoke to me, of course. My own memories of the war flooded back, and I felt anew all those old emotions.

As I said above, I couldn’t hardly put down the book and I stopped reading only twice. Once, when a picture of a blown-up and bloodied Humvee hit too close to home; I stopped only long enough to dry my eyes and pour a double-shot of Bulleit bourbon. Second, to go to sleep.

I was struck by how many of the author’s emotions and reactions to the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan I shared. At points, it felt like I was reading something I myself had written. But this was also reassuring, to know that I wasn’t the only one who felt helpless, who felt guilty for not doing more.

That feeling was the most poignant for me, and my biggest takeaway from the book. Ackerman recounts a personal sense of betrayal when he left the war despite friends continuing in it. It’s a choice all of us make, a choice not forced upon some previous generations. For veterans of World War II, the war was over when the empires of Japan and Nazi Germany formally surrendered and peace treaties were signed; in the Afghanistan War, as Ackerman puts it, thousands of individual peace treaties were signed by the thousands of American participants. The war went on, but we who left had finished with it.

It’s a guilt I still feel from time to time. If I’d stayed in the Marines, or re-enlisted as an Army Ranger like I’d once intended, I could have done more. Perhaps I could have, like Ackerman, developed enough of a contact list with important enough people to make a difference in the evacuation efforts.

But I didn’t, and I couldn’t. I wanted out because it was this very scenario I foresaw. After returning from my first deployment, after we buried our dead and held their memorial services, I realized that ultimately it would all fail. I’d seen enough of the war over there to know that one day we would leave, and on that day the Taliban would take over.

I told myself I could get out after four years and deal with the guilt and sadness of that day when it comes, or fight for another four or eight years, let the war take an even deeper hold of me, and still deal with the guilt and sadness when that day arrived all the same.

I chose the former, and I still don’t know if that was the right choice.

The Fifth Act was a fantastic, highly emotional work that takes you inside the mind of a veteran of America’s longest war as he watched it draw to a bloody, chaotic, and tragic end. It’s only about 260 pages and as I have proven something that can be read in a day, if you so chose.

I highly recommend this one to fellow veterans of the Afghan war, or to civilians who wonder what we may have felt in those harrowing weeks of the war’s end.

12 Strong: Film Review

/ Peter Martuneac / 4 Comments

I don’t typically watch movies about war, not anymore. It was one of my preferred genres as a 17 and 18 year old. Movies such as Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers, Letters From Iwo Jima. I’d seen them several times.

I then joined the Marines and participated in a war. Over in Afghanistan, I experienced the combat I’d only seen in movies and in video games, and that completely killed any taste I had for the genre. I can count on one hand the number of war movies I’ve watched since then and have fingers left over. I decided to break with tradition this week and watch 12 Strong, and that ended up being a good (and bad) decision.

This movie called to me in a way others just don’t, probably because it’s about the very war I fought in. Most modern war films are based on experiences from Iraq. Afghanistan, the new ‘forgotten war’, doesn’t get much attention. Perhaps because it wasn’t the kind of war Americans like to hear about very much, with its guerilla warfare, invisible enemies, and precious few glorious triumphs.

The movie is based on the true story of ODA 595 (Operational Detachment Alpha), a group of 12 Special Forces soldiers who were the first American troops into Afghanistan after the 9/11 terror attacks. They are assigned what is considered by many a suicide mission: to link up with an Afghan warlord and help him drive the Taliban out of a key stronghold in northern Afghanistan. These soldiers aided the Afghans in combat, both directly with their rifles and indirectly by calling in massive airstrikes.

Because they were alone in a hostile country, these Special Forces soldiers got around the same way many Afghans did at the time: on horseback. Thus was born their legendary nickname, the horse soldiers.

The movie unfolds in a fairly typical, predictable manner, and in that respect it wasn’t terribly good. There are no real surprises here. What I did enjoy was the overall accuracy and true to life portrayals of military life. The Special Forces soldiers who were actually part of the mission were brought on to advise the team, which was obvious to me as I watched it. The lingo, the mannerisms, the behavior, it all clicked. I said, “These are definitely grunts.”

The acting was also superb. Chris Hemsworth, Michael Shannon, Geoff Stults, Rob Riggle (who portrayed the soldier he once actually worked for during his time in the military), Michael Pena, and William Fichtner in particular all did amazing jobs bringing these real heroes to life on the silver screen, and the rest of the cast deserves a bow, too.

Navid Negahban as General Dostum was magnificent. The final lines for his character, when he speaks of Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires, really tied the whole movie together. There are no right choices here. This is Afghanistan, graveyard of many empires. Today you are our friend; tomorrow you are our enemy.

But I think what makes this movie about the Afghanistan war work is that it’s one of the few battles in the entire war that Americans would like to see in a movie: clearly drawn battle lines, enemies flying their flags vs good guys flying their flags, infantry and cavalry charges against artillery, and an ultimate triumph, a flag-raising over a defeated enemy. As aforementioned, such moments in Afghanistan were few and far between.

I recommend this one to any fans of war movies, or to folks who are interested in learning more about the war in Afghanistan. For a war film, the cursing isn’t bad and there’s no gory or over-the-top violent deaths, but of course there are killings by gunfire and explosions, and so the particularly squeamish may want to pass.

I myself enjoyed it, but all it did was confirm that war movies are no longer for me, especially not movies about Afghanistan. To sit there and watch the evil deeds of these Taliban terrorists, murdering a woman for daring to teach girls how to read, executing a man for listening to music, stoning another woman to death for not wearing her veil. Make no mistake, the US military may not be a perfect organization, and we’ve made our own mistakes, but the Taliban are pure evil. They hate you, whoever you are, and would slit your throat without a second thought.

And now those wicked men are back in charge. They won. Evil defeated good, darkness swallowed the light. It’s like if The Lord of the Rings ended with Frodo captured by a Nazgul and the Ring returns to Sauron.

It kills me to admit it, to know the most primal, visceral act I ever engaged in, the act of war, was for naught. We won every battle, but those bastards won the war. So much blood spilt, bombs dropped and bullets fired, lives lost and families ripped apart, all of it, for nothing. Nothing has changed. The Taliban rule, and the Afghan people suffer.

I don’t believe I’ll be watching any more such movies. It’s just too painful for me, and it left me depressed for a few days. It took me until today to finally write up a review though I watched the film on Tuesday. But again, for the rest of you, I do recommend it. It’s a story that deserves to be told and to be heard.

All Quiet on the Western Front: Movie Review

/ Peter Martuneac / 3 Comments

Available on Netflix, this is a film I’ve been meaning to watch for a while now. I went into it expecting an experience based on the novel of the same name, but got something entirely different. That’s not a bad thing, but I wasn’t thrilled with the choices made by the directors and producers, either.

The film opens with complete silence, the camera facing upwards at snow-covered treetops. The serenity is soon shattered by the sounds and sights of war. You watch as soldiers die in a hopeless charge. I appreciate the affect here and it was well done, but none of the characters you see are the protagonists. It ends up feeling like wasted time. Again, I don’t think this was a bad choice per se, but the book opens with the main character, Paul, in his home village, and you get a glimpse of his idyllic life before he follows the drums of war.

There is a short scene after the opening scene of Paul and his friends as they happily enlist in the Army, but it doesn’t carry the theme quite as well as in the book.

Related to this, later in the book, Paul returns home on leave and finds that everything is the same, except him. He realizes that his war experience has changed him forever, and he eventually concludes that coming home had been a mistake. He is eager to return to the front because that is where he feels ‘normal’.

This is not shown in the movie at all, and that, I thought, was a big missed opportunity. The theme of the story is not just the horrors of war, but also how it changes the soldiers who return. It’s an important theme to explore because I don’t believe many civilians consider it.

We all understand the ‘ticking time bomb’ cliche, when the war veteran is constantly angry, drunk, and suicidal (this harmful stereotype is a whole other problem to be discussed another day, by the way), but in reality, so many more veterans internalize any grief or stress. They blend in because they know they have to. They’re home again, but they know they’re not really home. Home was before, when all was innocent, and they had all their childhood friends.

That’s gone forever. As the book shows, the hometown and the childhood friends are all the same, but the veteran is the one who changed, and he can’t be unchanged.

Failing to explore this theme left me feeling not so high on the movie as I might have been. I immediately contrasted it to the end of They Shall Not Grow Old by Peter Jackson, a film I consider required viewing. At the end of that film, you hear an old veteran of The Great War telling a story about returning home to his old town, returning to his old job, and reuniting with his old coworker. His coworker, who had remained at home, sees him come in after four years of being apart and says to the veteran, “Bob! Haven’t seen you in a while. You been working nights?”

And the movie ends there. I get chills just thinking about this powerful testimony. After four years of some of the most hellish warfare humanity has ever fought, the warfighter returns to an old friend asking if he picked up a different shift. The old friend is no longer a true friend because he can’t possibly relate to the warfighter. That old friendship is, in a word, gone, and the warfighter knows this. He knows that he will forever be an other.

Overall I enjoyed the film, and it did do a good job of faithfully representing the anti-war message of the book, but I thought there were too many missed opportunities. There’s another neglected section of the book that shows the boys struggling with a cruel, domineering corporal at the barracks before they ever even see war, but this review has gone on long enough.

I recommend this film (in the original German) to students of history, but I also feel compelled to warn you about some pretty severe violence. I’m sure you would expect that given the film’s subject, but be warned that it can get extremely graphic and includes gruesome hand-to-hand combat.