Sound familiar? I was reminded of all the Vietnam films I’d watched as a kid. There’s a simple message in each of them, from “Platoon” to “Full Metal Jacket.” The war is about us , not them . Vietnam is merely the setting for Americans to understand what it means to be an American. What moral choices do we make? What is our national identity? How much strain on the psyche can we take before we crack? Did we lose our soul somewhere between Saigon and Hanoi? Those same questions are starting to be asked about Iraq—support for the war is at an all-time low—and the president was forced to acknowledge them.
In the classic Vietnam flicks, America’s own national identity crisis is almost always more important than the country where the war is actually being fought. Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” gives us the idealistic young soldier (played by Charlie Sheen) caught between the ’60s radical (Willem Defoe) and the hard-nose realist (Tom Berenger.) The film ends with an airstrike being called on American troops; Sheen’s private kills Berenger’s sergeant, and Defoe is dramatically gunned down. America at war with itself, its own morals and national character locked in battle. In Brian De Palma’s “Casualties of War”—a movie about a squad of soldiers who kidnap a Vietnamese girl and rape her on a long-range patrol—we see the same thing. The Vietnamese aren’t the enemies; the struggle is over America’s conscience. (To the point, the recent accusations leveled against Steven Green and some fellow soldiers accused of raping a 14-year-old girl bear eerie similarities to the film.) Or in “Apocalypse Now,” based loosely on Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness,” when the hero finds his Mr. Kurtz in the form of Marlon Brando. The most influential Vietnam memoir, “Dispatches”—written by Michael Herr, who also worked on the “Apocalypse Now” screenplay—ends with this line: “Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we’ve all been there.” Of course we haven’t literally, as Tom Bissell recently pointed out in Salon. It’s a state of mind where nothing is as it seems, a line that captures what Vietnam meant for Americans, not for the Vietnamese.
There haven’t been any great films yet that tackle the Iraq war. Maybe it’s too early. Maybe the war hasn’t reached that level where the strain on America’s psyche becomes unbearable, forcing the country into a real bout of uncomfortable self-reflection. The large majority of Americans still experience Iraq by looking at the daily death tolls scrolling across the bottom of their TV screens. There is no draft and casualties are relatively low. Outside of the families with loved ones in the military, the biggest strain on the psyche comes at the gas pump. Americans aren’t really close to a war with themselves, as in Vietnam, perhaps because the war doesn’t have much meaning in their day-to-day lives.
It’s another story for Iraqis. If America’s soul is tied to Iraq, Iraq’s soul is now desperately intertwined with America. The Iraqi psyche is badly damaged, mainly because Iraqis actually are at war with themselves. We’re involved in a country, as a colleague of mine recently noted, where both U.S. and Iraqi officials consider only 20 killings during a religious pilgrimage, as happened this week, a success. Sadly, compared to the usual 100 dead a day, it is a success. That can’t be too good for either country’s soul.
For Iraqis who are close to Americans, the situation—and desperation—is even worse. Earlier this summer, a leaked cable from the State Department described Iraqi employees working for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad who were under constant threat. They feared for their lives, faced harassment and the possibility of assassination. They lived double lives, unable to tell their friends and family about their work. The document was news only because it came from an official source—life for Iraqis working with Westerners had been like this for some time.
Back to the movies. I still wonder what future films about Iraq will look like. Well, there won’t be much pot smoking, sex or booze—those activities are against the rules in this mostly Muslim country, and strictly enforced by the U.S. military. They could fall in the mold of “Three Kings,” the David O. Russell film that turns the 1991 gulf war into a morality tale about America’s essential goodness. Or maybe they’ll eventually look like “Platoon” and “Apocalypse Now,” where a foreign land becomes just a canvas for another generation of Americans to soul-search. Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, we’ve all been there.
