The Hurt Locker

I seem to be on about movies today. There must be something coming up in Hollywood.

Paul Clarke

Indeed, the Hurt Locker does have a message of the impact on the individuals involved. The movie opens with the quote "war is a drug" from Chris Hedges book War is a Force That Gives US Meaning. Hedges suggests that war seduces societies, a concept echoed in the writings of retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich, who fears that America has fallen in love with militarism. And certainly, some members of the team are seduced by war, but the canvas of this film is much broader.

The film depicts the human cost of this conflict. We see the physical cost on the team members, and we see the toll on their families. While Iraq has largely fallen of the front page, the conflict continues and 100,000 US servicemembers remain in country. Because of the nature of our all-volunteer military, most Americans are immune to the war's real impact. In the Vietnam conflict, a whole generation of American males were subject to the draft and more than 8 million men and women served during the Vietnam Era. It was this commonality of experience that made the opposition to the war so powerful.

Of course, now we have a professional fight force and embedded journalists, so we turn away from what the war is doing to us as individuals. While we honor our servicemembers, we rarely have to look at the brutality of multiple deployments, of broken bodies and spirits and families pushed to brink. The Hurt Locker believes it is its mission to take you there. We see something of the Iraqi populace too, and their portrayal is nuanced, for while there are insurgents, the more common sense is that they are victims of the circumstances of war.

We like our heroes to be two-dimensional, and our military members have in recent years been given the same treatment. We salute their service, have a parade and close the door to the details. For five years, news about Iraq occupied our national conscious. But it has faded into the background, prematurely I think. The Hurt Locker returns us to the point where we need to be -- examining the impact upon those we ask to serve.

I have nothing to add to that other than the biggest Hurt Locker our troops will have to endure is apathy here at home for where they've been and what they've been through in an ignoble cause that was not their fault.