Funny How Things Change

I could be wrong, you know.

There’s plenty of things I don’t understand about this world. Nietzche said that if you stared long into the abyss, the abyss stares long into you at the same time. Of course, in one of my favorite movies, Blazing Saddles, someone quoted Nietzche to the effect that what does not kill us makes us stronger, and the response to that was, “Blow it out your ass, Howard.”

I like movies. I think a movie can be just as legitimately an art form as a fine novel, or a lovely song, or even a sonnet or an ode to a Grecian urn. Of course, there’s plenty of junk movies out there, to go along with junk books, songs, sonnets and odes. (I think Ode to Billy Joe would be one of the latter, but I haven’t seen it in years and years, since the mind of man remembereth not.)

Maybe one of the reasons I like movies is that I’ve watched a bunch of ‘em. Back when I was a kid growing up in Texas, in the Reagan years, I had a yen for what you might call fine cheese. By gum I liked movies where the evil Godless Communists took it in the neck at the hands of the right thinking forces of freedom. Now some of them were so bad that even I couldn’t really enjoy them. One of those “so bad” movies was Red Scorpion with Dolph Lundgren, which I even remember now only because, as it turns out, Jack Abramoff was involved in the production. (We should have figgered him for a no count sumbitch on the basis of that movie alone, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Anyway, I think that the two movies I’ve got stuck in my mind now are pretty good. At least, they made an impression on me, and I remembered them fondly, enough so that I bought them when they came out on DVD, just to have. These movies are Red Dawn and The Beast, or perhaps The Beast of War. We seem to be living in strange times, because those movies resonate with me lately in ways that are, umm, diametrically opposite to the way they used to.

Red Dawn was widely dismissed as a crackpot fantasy when it came out, because it was about a Soviet invasion of the United States. A quick precis of the film runs like this: Godless commies invade America, a few high school kids E&E (escape and evade) their way up into the Colorado mountains and begin a resistance movement, using their high school mascot as their code name. Go Wolverines! Written by Kevin Reynolds and John Milius, and directed by Milius, Red Dawn featured names that would later go on to, arguably, bigger and better things, names like Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson (who looked yummilicious in her tattered cammies and is arguably responsible for some of my fetishes to this very day) and Charlie Sheen, and some fine vintage performances by skilled hands Ron O’Neal, Powers Boothe, Harry Dean Stanton and Ben Johnson.

Let’s face it, you just don’t see Ben Johnson and Superfly working together just every day, do you?

Milius managed to push all the right buttons with this film. An opening scene shows a bumper sticker saying “You’ll take my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers” and immediately after, a Soviet paratrooper is, in fact, prying a gun from the cold dead fingers of its owner. The Cuban colonel in charge of the operation has his men go to the gun dealers and collect their 4473s to get a record of who’s been buying guns. Liberals, it is fair to say, just hated this movie, despite how yummilicious Lea Thompson looked in her tattered cammies.

The Wolverines set up their operation, up in the mountains, and enjoy some successes against the Soviet occupiers, including some lifted closely from then-current events in Afghanistan (which will tie into the second film’s discussion, below).

The scene that sticks in my mind, though, comes when one of their own has turned against the Wolverines (appropriately enough, the mayor’s son), and they find out that he’s swallowed a tracking device. They execute the mayor’s son and one of the Soviet troops who’d survived only to be captured.

Matt Eckert (Charlie Sheen): What's the difference, Jed?
Robert ( C Thomas Howell): I'll do it.
Matt Eckert: Shut up, Robert!
[to Jed]
Matt Eckert: *Tell me what's the difference between us and them!*
Jed Eckert (Patrick Swayze): Because WE LIVE HERE!

Because we live here. That’s enough reason to kill an intruder in your country. He’s an intruder in your country. Protecting your home is one of the oldest, and best, reasons to fight.

Because we live here.

I actually had a dream about this scene. I dream a lot, I’ve got enough Irish in me to be all dreamy and lyrical sometimes, and mostly I don’t remember my dreams too well, but I remember this dream, because it was just about that scene, except it wasn’t Matt and Robert and Jed talking. It was Ahmad and Suleiman and Ali. And it wasn’t a captured Soviet invader, and a turncoat American, that they were talking about executing, it was a captured American invader, and a turncoat Iraqi.

Because we live here. Reason enough, ain’t it? When you boil it all down? Now I’m not talking about some wetback from Chapultepec looking to wash dishes and cut lawns and send his money home to Mama and Papa and the family, I’m talking about foreign invaders on your soil, foreign soldiers who are in your country to fix it.

Somehow these days I just see Red Dawn through whole different eyes.

The other movie I wanted to talk about today is called The Beast of War. It was a pretty small drama, about a Soviet tank during the invasion of Afghanistan. During operations, the tank gets cut off from the rest of its unit, and takes a wrong turn, and is being stalked by the mujahadin. Directed by Kevin Reynolds (there’s that name again) from a play by William Mastrosimone, The Beast of War features George Dzundza at his scenery chewing best, a very young Jason Patric, Stephen Baldwin and Stephen Bauer. Interestingly enough, it was filmed in Israel.

Quick precis of the film: the cut off tank is being stalked by the mujahadin, and the tank commander, played by Dzundza, slowly flips his lid. He executes one of the tankers, an Afghan who manages to combine being a good Communist with being a good Muslim, and then abandons his tank driver, played by Jason Patric, for protesting the murder. Patric asks for mercy from the mujahadin, who take him prisoner. Eventually, he helps the mujahadin to destroy the tank, and is then rescued by a Soviet helicopter.

Dzundza is superb in this film. You can regard him as a madman or simply as a desperate military leader, and be none too far off in either case. When his character, Daskal, was eight years old, he’d fought against the Nazis in defense of Stalingrad, earning the nickname Tank Boy, since his comrades would tie a rope around his waist and lower him onto Nazi tanks, to place Molotov cocktails under turrets and cannon.

Patric too is quite good in The Beast of War. He plays Koverchenko, a sensitive intellectual who is nonetheless a fairly good soldier, and who believes in the rightness of what they’re doing. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, after all, to combat Muslim extremism, to bring, if not exactly democracy, but modernity and civil rights for women and stability to the country. Yeah, you probably see where I’m going with this one. Koverchenko is appalled by the brutality displayed by Daskal.

Daskal gets most of the good lines. He’s a tanker, all the way through, and it’s obvious that he loves his tank. When a Soviet helicopter spots the tank and offers them a ride home, Daskal refuses. “Get back in the tank,” he says. They ask him why. “Because I said to.” They say that they’re going home. He says, “Yeah. In the tank.” The troops ask why they can’t take the helicopter. “Because we’re tankers.” After the tank is crippled, he says, “Out of commission, become a pillbox. Out of ammo, become a bunker. Out of time, become heroes.” He's talking about blowing themselves up.

It is the tension between Koverchenko and Daskal, obviously, that fuels the movie. Initially, Koverchenko respects and fears Daskal for his efficiency and military skills, and for his history in fighting for their homeland, but eventually he is forced to ask, “How is it that we’re the Nazis this time, sir? How is that?”

I carry no brief for the late and unlamented Soviet Union. Stalin was a butcher, but the Nazis DID invade the Soviet Union, and the Soviets suffered on a scale that I, as an American, find almost literally incomprehensible. I saw the burial mounds outside of Kiev, just great heaping hills where they’d put the bodies. I had bad dreams about it for a long time. The battle for Stalingrad made Kiev look like a picnic. The Soviet Union did monstrous things, both within and without its borders, but the change from Tank Boy, fighting in defense of his homeland, to Daskal the crazed invader, is a change that I am worried about.

I’m not saying that the U.S. military is the Nazi party, or the SS, or even the Wehrmacht. I served four years of good, faithful and honorable service in the United States Marine Corps, and remain proud of the service I gave, and glad I gave it, to this day. But like I say, there are things I don’t understand. I don’t understand how our Department of Defense is involved in dang near every country, everywhere in the world. I was proud of my country when I served, which, thank God, was during peacetime. I thought we stood for cornball shit like Truth, Justice and the American Way.

Later on, I lived and worked in Kazakhstan for a few years. I met some former Soviet troops, including some who’d served in Afghanistan. They were just guys now, you know. Drivers, salesmen, computer techs. They’d done their time, got out, and moved on. They’d been proud of their country when they served. They thought that the Soviet Union stood for cornball shit like Truth, and Justice, and the Soviet Way.

Like I say, there’s a lot of things I don’t understand.

A while back, I found an article that William F. Buckley had written in the 1950s, talking about how, to defeat the Soviet Union, we had to become somewhat sovietized ourselves. We had to have a strong, standing military, we had to have a strong executive, we had to sacrifice some of our liberties, in order to remain free. We did those things, and we outlasted the Soviet Union. Sometimes I think back on Red Dawn, though, and wonder if it might not have been better if we hadn’t made those sacrifices, and that it might not have been better if the Soviet Union had invaded us, and we’d gone up into the hills, and potted Soviets at long range with deer rifles, and fought and beat them the American way. During World War Two, the Japanese thought about invading the United States, and concluded that 200 million or so cowboys hiding behind every cactus with a deer rifle would put a crimp into their plans. Sometimes I think we looked long into the abyss, and the abyss, she looked long into us right back. Sometimes I think we learned all the wrong lessons from the Soviet Union.

Now all things old are new again. We’re the ones invading, err, liberating, Afghanistan, and Iraq, from the forces of Mussulman reaction, we’re the ones putting in quota systems to ensure equitable female representation in the parliament, we’re the ones bombing a desolate country, we’re the ones using helicopter gunships and unmanned aerial vehicles with Hellfire missiles against villagers with jezails and Short Magazine Lee Enfields and Kalashnikovs, scenes that boiled our blood in Rambo III. But the mujahadin aren’t freedom fighters any more, they’re terrorists.

And sometimes I wonder, how is it that we’re the Soviets this time? How is that, sir?

NOTE: I wrote this three or four years ago. There's not that much I'd change, come to think of it.