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I'm half way through the Forever War. Dexter Flinkins deserves all of the awards this volume has garnered. The searing narration indicts us all, but I do not intend a review. There are plenty of those (www.dexterfilkins.net/reviews.html)
No, I would like to combine a few sources in a collage. . .
In 1979 the soviets invaded Afghanistan. In 1981, Israel was instrumental in producing a little-viewed movie entitled "The Beast." I happen to run across it in 1986, or maybe 1989, something like that. Since then, I've looked for it again. It provides an emotional and cultural context that is as insightful, I think, today as it was almost 30 years ago.
You can't find it at most Hollywood Videos or at Netflix but utube has like-minded people making their views readily accessible. So try the first 8 minutes of the movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkJ7pAnjTc8
The Russians speak English so the subtitles are quite manageable. The opening scene is brutal but the story is much more than a tale of gore. The empathy the audience develops builds to an unexpected conclusion. That empathy, so mixed and complex, and the ending disbelief offer an altered experience from "Standard Operating Procedures," or "Valley of Elah," or "Lions for Lambs," or "Road to Guantanamo," or any number of others. The particular empathy of "The Beast" helps the viewer appreciate Filkins commentary of the complexity we label 'Afghanistan,' the 'Taliban,' and Pakistan
It also brings to mind Kipling:
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
(Rudyard Kipling, THE YOUNG BRITISH SOLDIER)
This last month, NPR broadcast an interview with Dexter Filkins. The Forever War is now in paperback and he was in the States for about 6 weeks. His interview focuses on the fighting, expected to increase during the summer, and strangeness of war in a 4th century land with a poppy-based economy.
Filkins finishes his interview with comments which liken Pakistan to a science fiction movie: 175 million people with a literacy rate of 30%, a strengthened and nurtured Taliban, and nuclear weapons.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104802646
I have no experience traveling to Afghanistan, to Pakistan, to any Middle East country. Like so many, I am but an armchair philosopher, judge, and definitely a juror. I consider my judgments slow, weighed, and evaluated. I have lived without electricity, with hand-pumped water, with rain coming through the walls and the roof, with trips to the outhouse through snow drifts. I can survive those. I can fish, I can skin a rabbit or a porcupine. I have split wood, cleaned a carburetor, dismantled, cleaned, and reassembled a ship's condenser pump. . . so many little survival skills. But live in reality of Afghanistan or Pakistan? Nothing seems so daunting yet so enticing.
Until I do, I will rely on the voice of people like Filkins and try to temper my judgments and hold my tongue at least a little.
When the night is gathering all is gray.
But we look that the gloom of the night shall die
In the morning flush of a blood-red sky.
Friend of my heart, is it meet or wise
To warn a King of his enemies?
We know what Heaven or Hell may bring,
But no man knoweth the mind of the King. . .
. . . Heart of my heart, is it meet or wise
To warn a King of his enemies?
. . . Of the gray-coat coming who can say?
When the night is gathering all is gray.
Two things greater than all things are,
The first is Love, and the second War.
And since we know not how War may prove,
Heart of my heart, let us talk of . . .
(Rudyard Kipling, THE Ballad of the King's Jest)
