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Lately I've stumbled on a new (to me) dark corner of the internet: VetTV.
At first I thought it was just a youtube channel, since it was showing up in my shorts feed. And I assume that's what it started as. But eventually it became a full-fledged subscripion service with its own website, which you can subscribe to for just $6 a month (not an ad, I just thought it's interesting that it's a paid service but the cost is so low).
Anyway, they do have some very funny shorts and short videos. Mostly screwball, low-brow comedy, like you'd expect from young people who just got out of the military, especially the marines. Some of my favorites were: innappropriate gunny vs young marines, high school recruiting and holy waterboarding.
Bear in mind, those are just the clips they could get on youtube, the full episodes on their site are much more raunchy. It's obviously not a big budget production, but it is a little more polished than typical youtube channels. It's a low-budget yet professional studio where absolutely anything goes. So, well... they have some promotional clips where they compare themselves to a porn sites, and that's not wrong. It's interesting to see what ordinary people can come up with on a camera when there are absolutely no restrictions.
They have a few full-length (lightly censored) episodes on youtube for free. In particular I really recommend Recruiters. I liked it because... well, many reasons.
Their more serious series is A Grunt's Life. This one... is interesting, but it's a very tough watch.
As a work of art, it's certainly powerful. It made me feel things. It sucks me in to the whole "whoo rah, kill 'em all" feeling of comeradie and bravery, and makes me curse those stupid officers who won't let the grunts just "do what needs to be done."
But then I step back a minute. Granted, I was never there, I'm just a sissy civilian who only read the news. But from my perspective... the higher up officers were correct. The grunts in the show are basically just murdering civilians, or at least going way, way past any sort of justified warfare. The Afghanis are, quite reasonably, furious that these foreign invaders keep killing them, and they have no idea why because of the huge language and culture barrier. The officers are trying to bring peace, while people like Lt. Murphy just keep fanning the flames by killing people.
It reminds me a lot of two other famous war movies, which I'm sure it was inspired by. Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse now. In both cases, there's a bad guy (the drill sergeant and Colonel Kilgore) who looks super cool and badass in the movie. People love those characters. But I think it's important to keep our perspective and remember that they're villains who caused immense harm and suffering. I wish people were more film-savvy and could see that, because I don't think those movies are at all ambiguous.
Also, after writing out all of this, I realize that almost all of their characters are marines. So in some sense, it's not really about military life in general, but just the marines. It's almost like, how civilians see the general military, is how other military branches see the marines. Or maybe it's just that people in the marines have a hard time transitioning back to civilian life after leaving the military, and need something like this to cope.
...Thoughts on any of this? Sorry I don't have an exact thesis statement here. Maybe it's a sign of how corrupt and out-of-touch Hollywood is that we need something like this to bring us "real" cinema. Maybe it's a sign of how we're all so brainwashed by porn that porn starts to influence everything else. Maybe it's a sign of how horrific military life is that it just can't be expressed in any mainstream media. Maybe now, with cellphones and social media, we can finally see "the truth" of what war and military life is really like. Maybe it's just funny to see women trying to act like men, when mainstream TV usually shows the opposite. Or maybe I'm just bored and looking for something new I can't find on Youtube.
I'm not a vet, but I made some effort to follow the war in Afghanistan as closely as possible for much of its duration. My understanding is that the Afghan war was quite bad.
The "winning hearts and minds" aspect appears to have been aimed primarily at American hearts and minds, not Afghani ones. That is, the goal was to persuade Americans that they were winning Afghani hearts and minds so the mission could be sustained, as opposed to actually winning Afghani hearts and minds. When the Afganistan papers leaked following the pullout, my understanding is that this was more or less confirmed by internal documentation; the leadership and administration had no idea how to actually win the war or what that would even look like, and so they defaulted to "what can we do that will look good back home?"
The Taliban appears to have had what amounts to a durable public mandate throughout the war, and there is at least some argument that they were in fact the good guys, to the extent that the term applies to a place as alien as Afganistan. They'd ruthlessly suppressed opium cultivation and the practice of Bacha Bazi, ie organized rape of young boys, to give two examples of concrete moral issues; the factions we sided with were, from the accounts I've heard, enthusiastic proponents of both. I've heard numerous accounts from vets about how they were ordered to not interfere with drug cultivation, and how they were told to ignore what their Afghan "allies" were doing in their barracks on the weekends.
I would argue that the higher-up officers were in no sense "correct". They were essentially running a scam, whereby they ordered the low-level soldiers to do highly dangerous, exceptionally pointless and often quite evil things in pursuit of meaningless bureaucratic objectives, shoulder to shoulder with "allies" who were frequently moral monsters, and not-uncommonly on the enemy's payroll. On top of that, they're soldiers, not policemen, and their entire training and corporate ethos is based around breaking things and killing people. They're a hammer, and most of the things around them are nails, and some of the things that aren't nails probably ought to be... This was not an environment that encourages deep ethical analysis and carefully regulated restraint.
Presumably it would mean something like "set up a new government in Afghanistan that has some sort of stability, and doesn't hate the US, or at least doesn't hate us enough to sponsor terrorists."
Which, sure, is a challenging goal! Especially after we invaded their country and toppled their government. And like you said, the Taliban was (and is now) doing some good things... but then there's that whole "harboring Al-Qaida" thing. In hindsight we probably should just destroyed Al-Qaida but left the Taliban in charge and left. But with them gone we were kinda commited to putting up a new government so it wouldn't just turn into an even worse breeding ground for terrorists.
I can see how the low-level soldiers didn't want to do dangerous things when it would have been much safer and easier to just "shoot first, ask questions later." But the basic logic is sound... if you do that, you're just creating more and more enemies in a never-ending cycle. If you kill 9 insurgents but also accidentally kill 1 civilian, and that 1 civilian has 10 friends... congrats, you've just created 10 more insurgents and made the problem worse.
In the show, the grunts aren't even trying to be careful. They seem quite happy to kill anyone they can, including women, children, and injured prisoners. They have a running competition to see who can kill the most. When their Afghan allies get killed, they just laugh. The main character keeps a collection of body parts as war trophies. At one point he and another character take turns raping the corpse. I realize this is just fiction, but it seems to show what a lot of vets wish they could have done in the war. They really hated the Afghanis... not just the enemies but all of them, in a very racist way, and wish they could have committed genocide. That's pretty disturbing to me.
That very clearly was not their definition of a victory condition from the start. Even your far more limited goal very clearly was not possible to do, and I think the evidence shows that the people in charge clearly knew it wasn't possible to do from fairly early on. Like, even if they could output something like the above as an abstract mission statement, there never were concrete variables in the real world to plug into those abstractions. The Taliban were the best chance by far for stability, there were no significant runners-up. Moreover, long before our involvement there ended, my understanding is that we ourselves were once more providing cash, arms and training to Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria.
I was following along when all this got rolling. I remember that the Taliban sent a last-minute offer to hand over Bin Laden just before the invasion kicked off, but Bush turned them down in favor of invasion. The reason, as I understand it from the events I observed, is that a large part of the theory and strategy behind the GWOT was that we could in fact engineer these Islamist theocracies and dictatorships into modern liberal democracies. That was never going to happen, hence all the lies told over the next twenty years to cover up the fact that it wasn't happening.
If you shoot first and ask questions later, you "create more terrorists", but you live. If you ask questions first and shoot later, you run a significant risk that they shoot you while you're trying to ask questions, and then recruit more terrorists anyway on the grounds that they're national heroes killing the hated infidel occupiers. Spare me the COIN cliches: I'm already quite familiar with them, and I observe that the people promulgating them have not actually delivered a victory to establish the reliability of their model. So if you kill 9 insurgents and one civilian... why are you confident that the 9 insurgents you killed aren't better recruitment material than the one civilian? Why are you confident that the harm those 9 inflicted before they were killed wasn't better recruitment material than the killing of the one civilian? Why are you confident, in short, that the problem was how the soldiers on the ground did things, and not the orders and policies those soldiers were dutifully carrying out?
Sure. This is war as soldiers prefer to wage it, prioritizing their own agency above all, as opposed to war as soldiers actually wage it, with strict discipline and execution of orders from those far away. One of the things I've pointed out before is the madness of our demonization of the idea of "just following orders". Humanity has spent literal millennia trying desperately to get soldiers to "just follow orders", and to their credit, everything I've seen indicates that in Afghanistan, our soldiers did in fact follow orders fairly well. That doesn't mean they have to like it, and their discontent finds expression here.
Again, I emphasize that, based on numerous vet accounts, it was common knowledge for US line troops that the Afghan army units they were training and fighting alongside were routinely conducting the organized rape of children, right there in the camp next door, and it was again common knowledge that they were not supposed to interfere with this conduct. These were the Afghans with whom they could be expected to have the best relationship out of any in the country. I'm given to understand that it was common knowledge that a great many of the rural civilians were openly engaging in poppy cultivation to feed the global heroin market, and that a considerable portion of them were tacitly or enthusiastically supporting the Taliban. These were the people they were expected to fight beside and for, enduring daily misery and constant threat of sudden, violent death, possibly from their own allies, in pursuit of an obviously impossible and pointless mission.
I'm not what you might call a genocide enjoyer. I think genocide is pretty bad, and if anyone reading this is considering genocide, please don't do it. If you wanted to figure out a way to get a person to support the idea of genocide, though, the above seems like a pretty good way to do it. I do not think this is a moral failing of American vets; I think this is how humans naturally respond when you trap them long-term in a deplorable environment.
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