Afstan: The movie

Novelist Andrew Klavan has, er, issues with Hollywood--excerpts from a longish article (via Freelance Writer):

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I was on my way to Afghanistan because of the movies. Really. Movies like Brian De Palma’s Redacted; In the Valley of Elah, written by Paul Haggis; and Lions for Lambs, starring Robert Redford—movies about the War on Terror in which our soldiers are portrayed as rapists or post-traumatic murderers or naive fools roped in by warmongering neocons. I went because of the movies that didn’t get made, too—the movies that never get made—movies in which the heroic U.S. military defends our nation’s principles of liberty against a low, violent, Islamofascist miscreed. I wrote about these films in City Journal (see “The Lost Art of War,” Winter 2008) and in the Los Angeles Times. I attacked Hollywood for wallowing in outmoded European ideologies and for resurrecting imagery left over from movies about Vietnam.

Then, after a while, I started to ask myself, “Hey, wait a minute. How do you know what a movie about the War on Terror should look like? What would your movie look like, big mouth? What kind of story would you tell?”

My articles had attracted the attention of a Civil Affairs officer in the Army reserves, 46-year-old Major Rory Aylward. A tall, bespectacled man with mildly sardonic features, he was nicknamed Hawkeye because he looked a bit like, and talked exactly like, Alan Alda’s snarky Hawkeye Pierce from the television version of M*A*S*H. He was an unlikely mix of military and showbiz, a lifelong reservist but also a technical and creative advisor on military-themed movies like Courage Under Fire and Hallmark TV’s Silent Night. He was eligible for retirement but had volunteered instead to join a unit heading for Afghanistan. When I told him what I was thinking, he invited me to visit him there. First I would join his unit for battle training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina (see “Braggistan in the America of the Imagination,” Summer 2008). Then I would be embedded with it for a couple of weeks in Nuristan, one of Afghanistan’s least developed provinces...

Here, then, is the movie I would make. It would be something like this, anyway. With maybe Ed Norton as Rory—Alda’s too old now. And Dennis Haysbert, President Palmer from 24, as Mitchell. Someone fresh like Jim Sturgess for Baronner. Perez? George Clooney doesn’t deserve to play him, but he could.

I would probably make the mission to build the bridge and the mission to buy the FOB site into one mission. A bridge is more visual, but the tensions with the natives over the site make good drama. I’d have the ambush happen at the end of the first act, with a likable gunner getting killed. Then maybe our guys wouldn’t be able to return to base because of the weather. They’d be stuck up in nowhere with some locals they couldn’t trust and the bad guys still in the woods. It would become a matter of life and death whether the PRT guys could count on the goodwill of the natives in order to smoke out the bad guys before getting smoked themselves.

That would be the theme, see: the frustrations of building goodwill in wartime. Because goodwill is the key to this multifront counterinsurgency. It’s the only way to win the locals away from the brutal scum who’ve enslaved them in the past and over to some semblance of liberty and the rule of law. That’s why Information Operations—what they used to call propaganda—is so important. That’s why the bad guys work so hard to spread lies about us.

And that’s why Hollywood should maybe try not to help them.

Leftist movies portraying our troops as reprobates and fools may not make it to the wilds of Nuristan. But you can bet they make it to the headquarters of our enemies and give them encouragement, not to mention ideas. They make our soldiers’ mission harder and increase the danger to their lives. And here’s a funny thing some people in LA may not understand about those lives: they’re real. Commander Perez and Rory and First Sergeant Mitchell and all the rest—they’re not characters played by actors. They’re real Americans who left real parents and wives and children at home and opted to fight our enemies in dangerous places far away. I don’t think De Palma and Robert Redford and Paul Haggis are bad men. They’re certainly entitled to believe what they want. But when they make these movies during wartime, when they endanger these soldiers and their mission, I think they’re doing something bad—something wicked, really. They are aiding and abetting the enemy’s Information Operations. And they ought to stop...

Andrew Klavan is a City Journal contributing editor and the author of such best-selling novels as True Crime, Don’t Say a Word, and, most recently, Empire of Lies.