Before we start, concerning last week’s surprise destruction of The Escapist’s video team, the YouTube channel Clownfish TV (which I’ve recommended before) uploaded a video a few days later that I contemplated dedicating a post to, but ultimately decided that it wasn’t worth it. The minds behind the channel are staunchly independent of any corporate oversight and maintain this position above all else for a better deal in the long-run. The Escapist was bought by a conglomerate which complicated things, and while the team of Kneon and Geeky Sparkles have zero love for dishonest games journalism, part of what motivated a possible post would’ve been to correct the record and clarify what actually went on… or at least I would have.
After sitting back and analyzing what the video concerned, I realized that most of the criticism was elsewhere on The Escapist site and that one’s opinions seldom influence business rules especially from the outside looking in. For me, it didn’t feel like that because the comments section was what got to me.
It’s worth noting that this tends to be the nature of YouTube communities; channels do have their dedicated base and this often leads to biased echo chambers with again very little influence on what goes on in the afflicted realm. Also worth keeping in mind was that reporting on pop culture in any capacity is merely another day in the office for Clownfish TV. Malice can’t be assumed all things considered. As for the community, the one piece of advice that works for me is to get the entire story before judgment is passed. Get all the context and then give your final thoughts.
Now for the real topic I want to write about: military novels. Personally, I’ve never been all that interested in them, and since I’ve been around on r/Army, reading the occasional news stories of controversiessurrounding thespecial forces community in particular, I’ve held a dash of skepticism to go along with what describe as a Heroic Tit-wank in Print form. If you don’t know, special forces like Army Green Berets or Rangers, Navy SEALs, Recon Marines, Air Force Combat Controllers and all of them tend to get the Hollywood treatment more often than not. I’m not saying they don’t deserve the recognition for their sacrifices, their missions, their stories, but they’re not exactly a monolith.
For every Medal of Honor recipient of any capacity like Dan Daly or Ralph Puckett or Alwyn Cashe, there’s also these guys making fools of themselves:
Credit: Getty Images
Credit: Getty Images
Clearly, the worst or more embarrassing stories of the military’s finest aren’t reflective of everyone including the HR folks or the intelligence or signal branches or anyone else who sees it as just another job, but sometimes it gives me pause for thought. As a history buff, I do like military history as well. The Elusive Samurai motivated me to research the Kenmu Restoration and the Ashikaga Shogunate in medieval Japan, for instance, and more than once I’ve done some light research on Civil War battle orders or even the Roman Empire, among numerous other things.
Channel: Metatron
Before even entertaining the idea of the military as a whole, the movies and whatnot all seemed so cool. Call of Duty and Battlefield led the way in cinematic experiences and memorable characters. After watching some more movies, and going to basic training myself, it’s safe to say that if you’ve been in the military — any military — you’re preconceptions are going to be challenged and your newfound knowledge on how things go in the real military will ruin a lot of movies for you.
Prior to shipping, I thought the boot camp portion of Full Metal Jacket was the highlight of that movie, primarily because of the characters: Joker, Pyle, Cowboy, and Gunny Hartman all make that movie, but stepping back from that, it’s divided first into how Marines are trained (sort of), followed by an active combat deployment to South Vietnam. The greatest irony of that movie is that for an anti-war film, so many incoming recruits watch and quote it ad infinitum, and expectedly so. The actors are the highlights of the movie and if it wasn’t for R. Lee Ermey and the jelly doughnut scene, then it probably wouldn’t have the same influence as it does almost 40 years post-release.
In the veteran community, lots and lots of media is heavily scanned and scrutinized based on what we’re all taught in boot camp and when we go off to train for the occupation we chose or have chosen for us based on test scores. This explains why movies like Generation Kill and the Hollywood misfit In The Army Now are more beloved amongst veterans and servicemembers compared to something like Zero Dark Thirty, American Sniper, or The Hurt Locker. Even vets who’ve never deployed to a combat zone (yes, this happens, ask around) will tell you that an overwhelming majority of the time is spent waiting to do something and that something goes by exceptionally fast. Such urgency…
Also, fair warning: the military has a frat house mentality. Keep in mind the ages of the people signing up.
So I’ve been rattling on over about military/war media and the reception based on the community viewing it, but I haven’t mentioned what I’ve been reading. As I said, I hardly ever had an interest, even in passing about these kinds of things, and even over time, now that I’ve been in a military training environment, I trend quite lightly these days. You’re drilled day and night about how to properly wear a uniform and even mishaps in film can get a vet’s dander up more so than stolen valor incidents.
I try my best not to overanalyze this stuff or make a monolith or standard-bearer of military/war media since a lot of it is for the public and like a lot of their real-life units, the special forces movies tend to play by their own rules. My rule for whether I should give something a watch or a read is wide reception. Even if the community hates it, it’s not good to let those opinions overtake or form future opinions on XYZ. But so far I have been enjoying Generation Kill, and I do like Saving Private Ryan and Dunkirk. Some of these I’m introduced to by proxy and they wind up being pretty good.
For Generation Kill, I went for the book first for comparison to the HBO miniseries. Nearly done with the book and the show so I might come back with some final thoughts. And getting back to controversies in the special forces community, there was one book that caught my eye. I don’t remember how I found it, but it’s called Code over Country by Matthew Cole. It’s based on the wide range of corruption and lax oversight within Navy SEAL Team Six. Once I get my hands on the book and get through reading it, I’ll try to make an effort to give my thoughts. Bear in mind, most vets and servicemembers won’t run into anything close to a special forces unit and for security reasons, most of what they do isn’t revealed until after the fact, so corroborating what I hear will have to be done by way of news reports like those featured on Military Times or its branch specific variants.
This post was kind of a misnomer all around, but before I close off, I want to make a case for the manga series Golden Kamuy.
I say this is a military series for a lot of the obvious reasons: veterans of a major war (Russo-Japanese War), active duty soldiers in uniform, commanders doling out orders by their judgment, and more. But it also takes the tropes of traditional westerns like those of the Clint Eastwood or Dances with Wolves variety.
I have a post in the pipeline regarding Golden Kamuy itself so look forward to it in the next few weeks. I’ll elaborate further on my case then.
There’s no question by now as to what I like. Most of my posts here have a video game or animanga focus, but let it be known that I have more in store than Japanimation and rhythmic button-pressing. It’s the title of this post which I should clarify. While I used to gravitate mainly mobster/organized crime centered media, for the most part the characters and organizations therein were largely fictional or fictionalized. Stop me if this sounds familiar: mobster movies tend to require a bigger commitment compared to video games like the Mafia series, select GTA games, or the video game version of The Godfather. All solid series and franchises in their own right still, but even within a genre we each have our preferences.
But obviously fictional media interpretations of the Mob didn’t come from nothing. Crime fiction as a genre’s always been there, just look at the westerns. Lawmen, gunslingers, outlaws, big names like Billy the Kid, Bass Reeves, the Earp brothers. Whatever the criteria is for crime media, if it involves someone stepping on the law to get to a goal while someone else representing the law is stopping at nothing to stop them, then by all accounts it’s a crime movie… which probably means Lord of War falls into that too by my standards.
And this is quite apt, as Yuri Orlov was said to draw inspiration from the real life Merchant of Death Viktor Bout. And he’s not the only fictional criminal to be based on a real mobster. Sometimes the real life mobster themselves is fictionalized. If you know anything about Prohibition, you no doubt know about Al Capone and his ability to fool the cameras at least until St. Valentine’s Day. And since that time and following his death, countless movies have come out with him as the prime inspiration.
As for how I got to this genre, that’s really hard to say. At first, I thought it was from the GTA series, but looking back that’s probably inaccurate in my case. Movies? Kind of… my grandma does have The Godfather trilogy and numerous westerns, but I didn’t see some of these until I was at least 12. TV? Definitely not, my mom barred me from watching Family Guy until I was a teen due to sexual content. So in lieu of a true origin, I’ll explain some of my favorite media pieces from this genre. Starting with a game that puts you in the same boat as the law instead of against it.
Post-WWII, Los Angeles, war hero turned LAPD lawman Cole Phelps fights crime in the City of Angels. This is how it starts, but later in the game a conspiracy spearheaded by some of the city’s top officials is underway. The game gives the player glimpses of this in a string of newspaper clippings that can be found during gameplay, coupled with an interspersing of Cole’s service in the Marines during the war. Once everything is put together by the end, you have a near-perfect storyline.
I say near-perfect because the development of this game bogged down its own potential. A video game director who’s behavior would be welcomed in a Brazilian junta; a poorly populated 1940s rendition of L.A.; a finnicky motion capture technique that made interrogation impractical; a piss-poor implementation of a penalty system; and most disturbing of all, a dead studio.
Mechanically, it had great and interesting ideas, and if given the room to spread (read: taken out of McNamara’s hands at the time), these ideas could have inspired future developers for the better. Instead, it and the firing of Jason West and Vincent Zampella of Call of Duty fame unearthed a culture of toxicity that the video game industry is still trying to shake off. No matter the intention, eight years in the inferno for a paradoxically half-baked product tells anyone reading up on Team Bondi all they need to know about how things were handled from beginning to end.
To my knowledge, we haven’t had a story that nightmarish before or since then, but there’ve been several close calls. Needless to say, the behind-the-scenes drama that unfolded at Bondi is why I put L.A. Noire so low on my personal tier list. Without the crunch and a better management of time (and perhaps sacking McNamara), L.A. Noire could’ve turned out better than what we got in our timeline.
For a series I’d put firmly in the middle:
So far, I’ve had three different hot takes:
Kratos was right mostly
Boruto’s not that bad mostly
Chainsaw Man is predictable
We’ve got another on the list: The Godfather is Mid. And depending on who you ask, this is either sacrilegious or moot. It’s an influential novel and movie trilogy. It adds nuance to otherwise dastardly characters. It’s a source of inspiration for numerous directors on the big and small screens, but to me, much of this is a little lost in translation. It’s like playing GTA III after reading a list of all the game that have drawn inspiration from it, narratively or mechanically.
It’s not so much that I think it’s unbelievable (as in the laws of logic would never allow it), or that I think it’s terrible (clearly false), or that I’m saying it’s overrated, though others have said that before. It’s more like before and since The Godfather, there’ve been truckloads of mobster movies that I think did better than The Godfather. It might be the emphasis on subtlety that bogs it down for me, but a visual medium like film–while capable of telling instead of showing–should still show instead of tell, or in this case, show more than it tells. From what I remember it was 2/3s tell and 1/3 show.
But it does its job phenomenally well. Inspiration, references, inside jokes (even bad ones); I haven’t found a single person who hasn’t heard of the franchise in one form or another. It took the tropes of the old 1930s and 40s noir films and put new spins on them while also inventing some of their own. Watch a mobster movie or TV show made in recent memory, there’s a good chance that it’ll draw at least one thing from Mario Puzo’s novels or Francis Ford Coppola’s movies.
At this point, I’ve thrown shade at a big movie, suggesting I think there’s something better. Well, not exactly better but more so one I like a whole lot more than The Godfather:
For this one, I was a bit late. The other stuff I’d known about for years; I was first introduced to Black Mass the year it’s film adaptation released.
Channel: Warner Bros. Pictures
In the lead up to the release I read the book by Boston Globe journalists Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, intent on getting the full story of it’s star, James “Whitey” Bulger. Interestingly, the movie released a few years after the F.B.I. closed in on him in the summer of 2011 after 12 years on the lam. At first, I thought that the idea was exercised shortly after his arrest in California, but ever since the book was published in 2000 (and of course re-released 15 years later for marketing purposes), different ideas were thrown around to get an adaptation off the ground, but they didn’t exactly take off until 2015.
For my take, I’m sort of glad we got the final product that year as opposed to, say 2005. The movie mostly focuses on Whitey’s activities between 1975 and the mid-80s, but the epilogue detailing Whitey’s and his associates’ fates after the fun’s over is what sticks with me. Some of them snitched and got comparatively lenient sentences, others were thrown in jail for life or were sentenced with lifelong shame for colluding with Whitey Bulger himself, and the rest of the snitches were released earlier than the others for cooperation and continual good behavior.
As for Whitey himself, well as previously mentioned, an unnamed source warned the F.B.I. field office in L.A. that he was seen in Santa Monica, and he faced the consequences of his actions to the tune of two life sentences plus five years and a civil asset forfeiture of his riches totaling $25.2 million and another $19.5 million in restitution. Unfortunately for him, he’d fully serve these sentences on October 30, 2018 when he was bludgeoned to death by another inmate. Seems it was only fitting that his end was as grizzly as his life and leadership of the Winter Hill Gang.
As it stands, this is really the only mobster story that concerns an Irish mobster instead of Italian ones, and I’m always looking for stories on other mobsters the world over, not necessarily Cosa Nostra style. As of writing this, I’m trying to do some research on the Triads and the Yakuza for a story idea I have set in East Asia and concerning some of these characters. Fingers crossed, the research I do on these serves me well when I open a new Word document and get to typing. And it’ll also serve me when it comes to researching organized crime in other parts of the world. I know that they’re all there, it’s just that perhaps that I’m a New Yorker, a resident of the city where arguably the Mafia started and thrived, the origins of the Mafia and subsequent media genres thrives in this city, and most mobsters here being Italian or Jewish (see Kosher Nostra/Jewish-American organized crime for more details) sort of colors my view and at times my expectations of organized crime rackets, even fictional ones I hear about or create myself.
I also want to give a few honorable mentions to a few other properties I either haven’t seen but heard were good or I have seen but haven’t given them a proper ranking yet.
Casino (1995) — owing to what I’d been talking about with mobsters inspiring Hollywood, Frank Rosenthal’s gambling prospects were an interesting choice that I believe paid off quite well.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) — it meets my personal criteria of a crime movie and while I’ve neither read the book nor watched the movie, the premise seems like it’s worth a watch or read or both. If you’ve read the book, watched the movie, or both, don’t spoil me. I wanna go in blind.
To Live and Die in Los Angeles (1988) — also meets my criteria, but deals more with high crimes. I’ll rank it properly once I see it… in 10 years.
Fargo (1996) — The cinematic equivalent of you don’t have to do anything wrong for a plan to cock up disastrously. If anything, if anyone before this thought the Upper Midwest was to chaste for criminal behavior than digging through news archives of high profile crimes should change that perception. Fun fact: I watched this prior to typing my third manuscript. I anticipated a few scenes where the characters would pass the time talking about recently released movies and this was up there along with Waterworld, Fatal Attraction, and Pretty Woman. Fargo didn’t make the cut, as I recall.
Miller’s Crossing (1990) — You can’t really go wrong with the Coen brothers. The synopsis itself sounds quite complicated, wait ’til I see it in action; and finally;
No Country For Old Men (2007) — another Coen bros. flick, I saw this at a relative’s house a few years ago, and as cool as it was then, I think it’s worth a rewatch. I don’t know why films did and some still do this, but quiet mumbling as dialogue interspersed with operatic action noise is goddamn annoying. Dramatic or not, it makes me feel like I’m getting long in the tooth when a dialogue scene is near mute while the action scenes have the loudness of artillery volley fire.
Quite a list to try and rank properly. Maybe I’ll come back to this in the future.
I was originally gonna rattle off some of my favorite movies and what I liked about them, but I thought I’d get more mileage out of listing off my history with the medium, so I’ll go with that. I may list off some of my favorite movies recently or movie genres by the end, so look forward to that.
Getting to the topic of how my taste in movies developed, like all things, will be complicated. The history of that even more so, but to the best that I can remember, funny enough, it began with my mom and her siblings. The area of the Bronx that I grew up in had several local theaters in the 1960s and 70s, many of them are abandoned or were torn down in favor of a retail store or local pharmacy, but some that have stayed have significantly minimized their presence or reach. There might have been a trend in the 80s and 90s concerning access to cinema, probably with access to VCRs going stronger than an ox at this time, or some major movie distributor like AMC getting a huge boost, but I can’t say for certain whether any of these were the case. But if I ask my mom or aunts, they might say that it was.
Whatever the answer is to this chicken-or-egg scenario, it did mean that VHS tapes would be made in surplus over the years until they fell out of fashion with the rise of DVDs by 2002, only for those now to be seen as obsolete thanks to digital releases, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
For context, I was born in 1998, and, according to Legacy Box, VHS lost popularity around 2002-03. Some of the first movies I’d watched were formatted for a VCR and one of those happened to be a movie adaptation of a certain yellow sponge who lives in a tropical fruit.
Since it came out in 2004, I’m not entirely certain how it got to my house. I’m pretty sure an older relative of mine got it for me, but it’s been so long and whatever VCRs we still have these days is likely no longer compatible with modern TVs now. I’m confident that VHS releases of beloved movies of yesteryear have since become collector’s items due to the rarity, even at the time of release.
The SpongeBob movie certainly got some out of me as a kid, but at that time, anything animated was my bread and butter and seeing the porous cube for an extended adventure was a ginormous win. For other animated movies, I definitely remember watching a certain pair of movies as a kid. The first one was about an Inuit man who learned the hard way of what it’s like to disturb nature and lives his life as a bear as penance.
And I would only go on to continue watching Disney animated features of this making because that’s what Mortimer Mouse does best. He and Jimmy Carter may be the most prolific nonagenarians at work. Brother Bear was on DVD, and thus still compatible with modern TVs. Even back then, there were fewer problems regarding DVD players than there were with VHS tapes, so rewatching some of my favorite scenes from Ursa Fraternity was damn easy.
The second one was about a superpowered family juggling life between saving the day and the boring parts of Americana that get glorified for the sake of a joke on TV.
Also a 2004 release but on DVD, this was my go-to when the adults were busy watching MTV or BET sitcoms and movies, and I watched this movie a disturbing number of times because I was an only child and my options for entertainment, though present, were limited. Cell phones weren’t necessary in the early-to-mid 2000s and no good parent would let a child out after dark unless they genuinely knew what they were doing. I could go to the park, though that often meant waiting on my mom to take me there even though it was down the block from where I lived. So TV and video games for the rest of my childhood.
Between all of these, a reasonable conclusion to jump to would be that from a parenting standpoint, the movies I was allowed to watch at around 4 or 5 years old didn’t fall outside of established parental guidelines and from a child’s standpoint, heroes and villains here, monster fights there, save the day, get the girl, the classic Superman formula.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, because my mom was single at the time and my grandma hadn’t retired until 2004, this meant leaving me in either my grandma’s care or that of a neighbor who comparatively had three children and was seen as the go-to for some of the other neighbor kids. So 6-year-old, only child me often had to spend time with some of these kids who were not very far from their immediate siblings. So that was neat.
In line with that pattern, it might be because a lot of these kids were somewhat older, but for whatever reason, if I wasn’t witnessing MTV devolve in real time, I was watching a slasher movie. Of the ones I was unfortunate to see at a young age, the one about the masked machete wielder stuck with me for an uncomfortably long time. His collaboration with a sweater-wearing burn victim from the nightmare realm did me no favors, though there was a reason for me why the machete wielder was the worst of those two.
The other slashers and horrors were largely forgettable, but every goddamn time something reminded me of Jason Voorhees, I’d get mental images of a grizzly slaying. And why Jason? Why not Michael Myers, or Freddy Krueger, or Predator, or the Aliens from Alien? For me, it was because Jason and by extension Michael were so calm and collected. They walked into frame with a clear vision and a creativity only a psychopath could appreciate. Their flare for the gory and incorrect ways to use a lawn ornament and the fact that either one of them could do so much with just so little made it even more dramatic than it probably was. If they didn’t use their powers for nefarious purposes, they might be the first people to thrive in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. I’m pretty sure they’d be tailormade for the first part of The Last of Us 2 since that part of the game starts in a Wyoming winter and Max Brooks of World War Z fame wrote that in such a scenario the coldest climates are ironically the hottest spots on earth.
Needless to say, I didn’t start appreciating Jason or Michael until I was around 16 and part of that was because on reflection, so many horror movies at the time telegraphed and prioritized their jump scares over their stories that the money that should’ve gone to the screenwriter and storyboard artist went to the pockets of the soundtrack composers, and every time the brass section went nuts during a jump scare, the composers would need to run back to the store to get a new safe to hold all that cash. It was annoying!
Cliffordlonghead (YouTube), Nickelodeon, Viacom
Friday the 13th, Halloween and others did that as well, but not every five minutes. I think one day I’ll dedicate my research to the history of film scores.
By the time I was 15 or 16, trips to the theater fell to the wayside, reflecting a growing trend of home streaming and home video releases as Blockbuster shuttered its brick and mortar stores while Netflix thrived online, especially with shows like Breaking Bad being made available for streaming on the platform in the years following its airing on AMC, as well as many Netflix originals, short lifespans notwithstanding.
Followers of this blog can remember how clear and precise my words were when I admitted to emulating and pirating certain video games. What I didn’t mention until now was that it didn’t start with video games. I remember watching 300 on pirate sites in anticipation for the 2014 follow-up. And about a year later, after watching The Terminator on YouTube on a probably now deleted account, I heard through the grapevine that a fifth Terminator was releasing soon and when I later watched the trailers myself, I vowed to pirate it sometime in the future.
I avoided major spoilers for Terminator: Genisys while pirating online or catching the others on TV and by the time I saw the fifth one by way of piracy, my opinions on the fifth Terminator movie are thus:
I paid for nothing and still felt robbed. Okay, let’s dial it back. The first two movies and somewhat the third all did well enough to prepare you for what was to come about the prophecy about SkyNet launching on August 29, 1997 and the immediate aftermath that subsequent releases felt like they were written into a narrow corner and had to dig themselves out with a spoon and crossed fingers.
If I were to rate the series having only seen the movies, my opinions on them all are this:
The Terminator (1984): Fantastic. 4.5/5
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991): Also fantastic, like the original. 5/5
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003): Interesting take on the premise. 3.2/5
Terminator: Salvation (2009): Memorable only because of Christian Bale’s temper tantrum on set. Otherwise, missing crucial elements. 2.3/5
Terminator: Genisys (2015): Nice that you’ve got Arnie back, but are we still on the same timeline as Salvation or what? 2/5
My opinions on Genisys isn’t isolated either; other critics and viewers thought much the same. Call it for what it is, but if 2014 was starving for good games, 2015 was starving for good movies. Or rather, I remember more bad movies getting the adverts than I do the good or better movies largely because many of the studio heads were losing faith in these potential box office bombs. It might have cost the studios some dough, but from my perspective, being nose deep in the novel Black Mass in anticipation for its movie adaptation that year, it’s a good thing I spent that year invested in my own interests instead of following trends or I would’ve been even more disappointed with Fifty Shades of Grey.
This was a better film to have Dakota Johnson’s and Johnny Depp’s names on compared to what else they were in that year.
The latter half of the 2010s became the era of the Crazy News Segment and it was around that time I decided that Facebook wasn’t my style. Retreating into the movies at this time slowed down as I was dedicating myself to community college and whatnot, but I was still watching movies. The newer stuff coming out was putting me to sleep, so I went to some classics.
In my latter years of high school and all through college, I’d entertained the idea of joining the Army and thought I’d get a general idea of that through movies. Good idea? Bad idea? Well, the movies I’d watched that came to mind for me as quintessential war movies were centered around either of the two World Wars or Vietnam. I’m still searching for a good Korean War movie though.
In the U.S., copyrights are good for at least 75 years, and with the copyright long expired on one of these by the time I was able to watch it, technically, it wasn’t piracy. As I recall, this particular film and similar were archived online. If this is the case every time a movie gets that old, then as time goes on, whenever I want to watch an old movie, I have a beeline.
This movie was an adaptation of a diary of a German WWI vet, and as of 2022 was the first of about three so far.
World War I movies, I feel, have been muted by the clearer battle lines of its deadlier successor. You have villains, heroes, and a happy ending, hence why numerous intellectual properties in the decades since the end of World War II have looked on to the Nazis and the Wehrmacht as the perfect archetype for a villainous force of nature. Allow me to complain somewhat, but there were other armies of equal or worse brutality to look at for a template. Not saying you can’t keep using the Nazis or their 10,000 paramilitaries for reference if you want; just that it pays to look elsewhere from time to time. Consider your options.
And speaking of movies about the deadlier successor, an impromptu reconnaissance platoon sent into France to ship the sole survivor of the Normandy landings out of a family of five brothers back home, complete with a perilous journey through the occupied north.
And for better or worse, veterans of all strides who would otherwise take their stories with them to the grave were motivated to share them by proxy after watching the movie. It’s a fact.
In the case with Vietnam War movies, the diplomacy of the war itself at the time leads me to believe that it was a sign of things to come. Light my on the pyre for this, but experiences with guerilla fighting in Indochina probably would’ve helped to better inform post-9/11 warfighting policies in the Middle East if we stopped looking at things the same way we looked at World War II. False equivalency, you say? I do still have a point. Accounts from the French experience leading up to occupation by Germany in WWII draw toward the conclusion that if France had realized Round 2 would be a different fight, they would’ve been able to stave off occupation or at least better liberate themselves than in our timeline.
Similarly, U.S. military history has a gap between the fall of Saigon and the Gulf War that probably reminds folks of the current recruiting crisis the DoD doesn’t need as it’s the second time there’s been a military shortfall at home. In my eyes, the Vietnam-era movies serve a purpose and have important lessons that only now we seem to be adhering to–that is to say know your enemy and yourself; set and understand your goals; and one of the biggest lessons from the jungles of former French Indochina, make sure the populace is on your side. No one wants to be sent to fight in a country they can’t find on a map only to lose and come back and get harassed for what they were forced to do.
As for movies I’ve seen about the conflict itself, there are two that stand out that you probably know about. One was about a rogue special forces field grade who needed to be taken out and the other was about the most sympathetic of McNamara’s Misfits for the first half while also criticizing the nature of warfare in general in the second half.
As told by retired SEAL Commander Jocko Willink in this video, if a servicemember commits a crime overseas or goes rogue in-country/while deployed, their punishment is determined mostly by rank and performance prior to the crime. For example, if a private or private first class is under scrutiny, they could face any combination of forfeiture of pay, reduction in rank, imprisonment, or for severe crimes, execution for conduct unbecoming. Higher ranking enlisted soldiers may face that as well, but so far the highest ranking enlisted soldier I know of that has ever faced such a penalty was the 10th Sergeant Major of the Army Gene McKinney, and he wasn’t even reduced by that much. Below Sergeant Major of the Army is command sergeant major, and below that is either first sergeant or master sergeant depending.
Officers like that of Colonel Kurtz are in command of a large number of servicemembers, generally brigades. Being that high up in a chain of command with that much time in service (over 20 years avg.), he would’ve been captured and interrogated for what he’d done and any penalties would likely come from whoever was the Secretary of Defense at the time.
Now for that one about a McNamara-grade recruit…
In my experience in basic training, FMJ was the one to get the most love out of the trainees because we saw ourselves in those starry-eyed virgin recruits even if events depicted were exaggerated. R. Lee Ermey’s portrayal of a Marine DI was exaggerated for drama’s sake, and in the Army we didn’t have footlockers, and compared to the men who would be sent to Vietnam, our drills were, due to several factors, fairly lenient with us. That said, we still got the dog crap smoked out of us because the good idea fairy visited our battle buddy that day; or we learned to lock our lockers and secure our stuff when half of it was across the bay and other half was under my battle buddy’s bed in pieces.
That being said, looking at GySgt. Hartman’s conduct as a drill instructor, he would likely have been investigated for inciting hazing against Pvt. Leonard Lawrence/Gomer Pyle. Similarly, for how the boot camp section of the movie ends, even though those Marines were graduating and whatnot, the precursor to the NCIS would’ve gotten word of crimes in the barracks like a [spoiler warning] murder-suicide, especially if an SNCO like Gunny Hartman was involved in some way. With an even hand, after the dead are laid to rest, the whole platoon could forget about ever getting to Vietnam, though at this point in history, stuff was getting swatted to the wayside because the war effort was more important.
Fast-forward to Bush Jr. in Iraq boosting numbers for the 2007 surge and a round of stop-loss orders and most of those who were deployed at the time need three sets of hands to count the number of people who got in despite being previously disqualified for moral or medical reasons. Bonus points if the moral waivers offended in uniform. How do I know this? The Military subreddit among others holds the answers.
Above all, war films showed me that there’s always a gray zone even in the darkest moments in our lives or in history. Not everything has an easy answer.
Sorry if things got serious at the end there. Let’s take it back a few notches. My favorite film genres? Right now, it’s the war films since I clearly had more to say about them in this post. My Army brain isn’t gonna look at them the same way again, but for what it’s worth, the experiences from basic training to duty station to deployment to discharge are military-wide. Retired servicemembers from different ends of the political aisle will feel a connection because at one point they were clowns in the same circus. From this genre: Full Metal Jacket, Saving Private Ryan, Patton, and for atmosphere a Soviet Belarusian film called Come and See.
For something more humorous, comedies obviously work, but the talent lies with the writing and the characters. Done well, and I can see myself going back to a classic I enjoyed. Done poorly, and I’m praying to God, Lord Buddha, and Tom Selleck’s mustache that the writers of the god-awful “comedy” I was forced to watch walk into a door. From this genre: Identity Thief, Fargo, The Mask, History of the World, and Spaceballs.
And for action/adventure, my video game brain has been hardwired to expect a Point A to Point B plot with a clear goal and character arc. I don’t always get that, but when I do, my butt’s in the chair, my eyes are on the screen, and if I like what it opens with, I reserve judgment until the credits roll. If I don’t like it, I’m nitpicking from start to finish. From this genre: Red and Red 2, The Terminator until the third movie, London Has Fallen (kinda), RoboCop uncensored, and I want to put a martial arts film in here, but I haven’t seen any as of late. Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury will serve as a placeholder for now.
This was late, I know. We were having issues with our cable, and I was summoned to try to fix it until we phoned it in to the service provider. Hopefully, next week’s post will be on time.
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