A good thought on Gunner Palace

http://www.exile.ru/2006-September-22/war_nerd.html
"In fact, I just saw a movie that showed we weren't even paying attention in Iraq. It's called Gunner Palace, and it's one of these hand-held documentaries by an embedded ham. The idea is, the reporter hangs with a unit of GIs whose HQ is one of Uday Hussein's former playboy mansions in Baghdad. There's a huge swimming pool and a lot of glitzy decor and you can tell the reporter thought he was going to get famous for the irony or whatever: gritty gory soldier stuff with a background of Saddam-era luxury, etc.

I don't think this reporter even understood what he was filming. Seriously. There's a voice-over about how this unit of typical American young men copes with the dark and violent chaos of Iraq, bla bla bla, but that's not what the movie shows. What it shows is hams. Showoffs. A bunch of dudes who don't know where they are, don't care, don't speak a word of the language and don't want to learn it.

The only thing these dudes are interested in is hamming it up American-style for the camera. The only time they get excited is when the reporter lets them do their little routines: heavy metal solos or comedy skits from the whites, rap rhymes from the blacks. No, let's be fair here, in a wonderful sign of advancing integration, there's one scene where a black GI does a rap with backing electric guitar from this white guy, the class clown type who's onscreen for what seems like an hour. I personally would have had his humorous ass shoved up against the nearest wall and shot, but this cameraman embed loved him, couldn't get enough.

Halfway through the movie, there's a scene where the unit learns its lead interpreter, their go-to guy when they're asking for info in the neighborhood, the guy who translates every word they hear, is a traitor. An insurgent working for the other side.

That blew me away! But in the movie it's treated just like a little setback, another ho-hum problem of life in Baghdad.

Jesus, doesn't anybody have a clue about CI warfare? Your interpreter is EVERYTHING. He's worth more than all the Bradleys and Strykers you have. He's more important than bullets. He's the whole war. If he's a traitor, everything you've done has been worse than useless! Your local sources are blown. Your plans are known. Every local who was naive enough to trust you is dead or soon will be. The rest have learned a big lesson: never, ever talk to the Americans.

But in the movie, the scene where they arrest the interpreter is just another excuse to ham it up. The officer in charge ties the plastic cuffs on his wrist and keeps asking, "OK, do you want to be my GUEST or my PRISONER, Ahmed?" And Ahmed doesn't even answer, it's such a stupid question, such an insane question.

Ahmed is worrying about how long he'll have his fingernails, what they'll use to remove his eyeballs, how hot the poker they jam up his ass is going to be, and this ham is actually trying to be his pal. Finally Ahmed mumbles, "Your friend, your friend..." and the ham gives him a big smile, all pleased. Nobody in the unit from the commander on down seems to realize what a disaster this is. They don't even seem to want to extend their intel network in the area.

Even in the middle of a firefight, guys turn away from their machineguns to ham it up for the camera, like this is their big moment, their screen test, instead of combat.

I don't think it's pork that the Muslims hate so much, it's all the hams we've imported into their land.

I'll tell you something I don't usually like admitting: the first time I saw Apocalypse Now, I hated it. I thought it was pure libel against all the GIs who fought so hard in Nam, making them out to be ADD types who couldn't focus on the war for more than ten minutes. Because that's what that movie is about as a military document: showing how if you don't focus in CI warfare you can't win. The only guy in the whole movie who focuses on the war is Martin Sheen. That's why he's totally alone, while the rest go surfing or have their BBQ or jerk off over the Playboy bunnies USO choppers in.

Well, I still think the movie was unfair to Nam vets, because at least till Tet, a lot of our guys worked hard at learning the language and blending into the landscape. But I have to admit that maybe that hippie bastard Coppola was right in the long run. Maybe we just can't pay attention long enough to win in the long slow grind of CI.

And maybe Coppola's point about Kurtz was right: it's not that we need more troops in Iraq. *beep* no. After watching these hams screw everything up, I'm dead sure that's the last thing we need. We need a few thousand men who speak the language and don't have any qualms about doing all the dark, bad things that have to be done to hold on to occupied territory. And backing them up we need maybe 10,000 guys trained for the Phoenix Program: pure assassins who will kill anybody they're told to kill, on the quiet, without anyone ever finding out. Basically, we need warriors who don't want to make it in show business."