The Crazy Eights

Earlier this month, I posted about The Crazy Eights, a documentary by Gordon Henderson of 90th Parallel Film and Television Productions Ltd. Henderson and his cameramen Jerry Vienneau spent a solid month with the men of 8 Platoon, C Coy, 1RCR as they were recovering and reconstituting after a deadly fratricide incident last fall.

Now that I've had a chance to watch a preview of the piece, I have a couple of things to say.

Heather Mallick, John Doyle, and Noreen Golfman aren't going to pick this show for a movie-night brie-and-Chardonnay get-together. You see, active dislike of soldiers and their stories will preclude an appreciation of this piece of documentary film-making.

People looking for a true-life version of Hamburger Hill won't like it either, since there's very little fighting in the documentary.

On the other hand, soldiers and those who know soldiers will be captivated. Last week, I watched The Crazy Eights in the Junior Ranks mess of The Royal Highland Fusiliers of Canada in Cambridge with a soldier who fought as a member of 8 Platoon, but whose deployment with them was cut short by the urgent need to remove shrapnel from his legs. You see, he got tagged in the A-10 fratricide incident that sets the stage for director Gordon Henderson's film.

The privates and corporals in the JR mess that day enjoyed the show, because it stays true to the life of a soldier: "hurry up and wait." The dark humour, the compassion, the unconscious profanity, the matter-of-fact courage of Canadian soldiers all come through in The Crazy Eights.

Which brings me to a small beef. It seems at least one reviewer of the film needs to give his head a shake. Barrett Hooper, writing for NOW Magazine, calls the piece "passive-aggressive propaganda." Why? Because viewers will end up liking the soldiers they're watching. I'm not making this up:

Call it passive-aggressive propaganda.

A new CBC documentary presents a sympathetic look at Canadian troops serving in Afghanistan. Too sympathetic, perhaps.

...

While the film is certainly well-executed – Henderson spent a month embedded with the Crazy Eights in October – and noble in its intentions, it's also a little unsettling, and not because of its depiction of roadside explosions and mortar attacks. The unnerving part is the way the film allows us to relate to these soldiers and admire them. As a result, we want to support them – and by extension, the war effort – while the film never calls into question the reasons they're in Afghanistan.

Not the filmmaker's intention, I'm sure, but something to be aware of when you're watching.

I find it profoundly disappointing that Hooper can admit on the one hand that Henderson "does a remarkable job of allowing the soldiers to tell their own stories with little editorializing," but remains unsettled by the fact that an honest portrait of these uniformed Canadians elicits feelings of admiration.

Christie Blatchford addressed this phenomenon short months ago:

In my bones, I suspect that when some people criticize the Afghanistan mission, what they are actually uneasy about is the military, and soldiers, and particularly, given the combat focus of the Canadian efforts here, soldiers who actually are shot at and shoot.

There's no crime or shame in saying that. People should shout it from the rooftops, but be honest about it.

It is even understandable, since many Canadians (under years of mostly Liberal rule, it should be noted) have grown almost entirely disconnected from their military. Bases closed and disappeared as a presence in cities and towns; there was the nasty business in Somalia; aging Sea Kings fell out of the sky at regular intervals; and in Canadian schools, teachers dutifully helped generations of children address their letters to “Dear Canadian Peacekeeper.”

The cumulative effect was that soldiers were rendered strangers, and that in what passes for the intellectual salons of central Canada, “soldier” came to be synonymous with “joke” or “guy who can't get a real job,” which is pretty rich from those who dwell in university ivory towers, editorial boardrooms and on Parliament Hill.

It is no accident that the single most common observation I have heard first-time reporters, arriving to Kandahar, make after a few days is how bright and articulate the young troops are. It is usually said with considerable surprise. I think it mirrors some of the preconceived notions influential Canadians in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal pointy-head corridor hold about their soldiers.

I think Hooper's review in NOW is even more disappointing given the fact that Henderson himself has said that his objective was simply to introduce the soldiers to the Canadian public:

"I wanted to experience the soldier's everyday life," says Henderson in a release. "The Crazy Eights is not an analysis of the war. Its purpose is to give Canadians a sense of what our soldiers are going through."

It's a sense desperately needed by both the soldiers and the public. As Canadians, we're responsible for hiring, equipping, preparing, and deploying those who wear the uniforms of the CF on our behalf. We owe it to them to have at least a rough understanding of who they are and what they do, so that at the end of the day we can make informed decisions about the politics that determine so much of their fate.

This documentary deliberately avoids the political discussion, and simply gives us a taste of the life of a soldier in Kandahar province, a snapshot of what they were going through during the intense operations of last fall. Henderson leaves it up to us to take whatever lessons we will from the piece.

The Crazy Eights will air on Thursday, March 29, 2007 at 8:00 p.m. on CBC television, repeating Saturday, March 31, 2007 at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT on CBC Newsworld. Make some time to watch it.