Agitprop

It isn't what we say or think that defines us
but what we do, 
--Sense and Sensibility,  
 Jane Austin 
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Since the recent movie theater shooting occurred at a what was to have been a showing of  the film "Lone Survivor", we will address the event in two ways: today, the film as a misbegotten film effort to apotheosize a failed mission, and next, as the sort of media which serves as an irritant to a society whose attention is already stretched thin.

Marcus Luttrell's "Lone Survivor" turned a failed mission (Operation Redwings, 2005) into a celebratory media momento mori. But the the deaths of the 20 fine United States Special Operations Soldiers served no military function, therefore the fight served nothing of value to the outcome of the war. The operation was actuality a dereliction of leadership and a morally bankrupt interpretation of soldiering values. When myth, entertainment and propaganda steal the truth from an event, we are delusional.

Ranger asks -- in opposition to the "Code of Conduct" and the creeds of an imagined warrior caste in the U.S. military-- "What if the SEALs of Lt. Murphy's team had surrendered?" There is precedent for this sort of action (an entire U.S. field Army surrendered at Corregidor and Bataan.) When there is no military purpose served, then why fight to the death? Surely Murphy's team knew they were dead when the hostiles gained contact.

In previous RAW commentary on Redwings, we have written that the Murphy team should not have launched this mission. However, once engaged and the the odds were clear, surrender was an option, even if a risky one; "slim" is better than "none". 

The reasons for not surrendering are to prevent routs, penetrations and all those things that were not present at this fight. No other American units would have been endangered if the Murphy team had surrendered. So what were they fighting for? This must be determined before sending Soldiers into harm's way.

"Lone Survivor" is posed to become a hit, in the same way as did the the Navy's Disneyfied film, Act of Valor; as did the propaganda film "Hurt Locker", by our own Leni Riefenstahl (dir. Bigelow.) Symbol and reality are separate, and when the story is better than the reality, we will always go with the tall tale. 

But soldiering is an act of logic and cold calculations that should not be mixed with romantic warrior ethics of fighting to the death. Our Soldiers are not Ninja, Samurai or Kamikaze, yet they are depicted as such. 

In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, we prefer the comfortable and reliable bland to the real, and we have become complicit in broadcasting the simulacrum through our media. In our Age of Spectacle, we will always prefer the performance to the actuality.   

We could not win the war, but we could take a trivial, tragic defeat and transmogrify it into a heroic, death-defying battle. Defeat then becomes a mythic victory when the man who could be the truth-teller becomes complicit in his own dream.

This is alchemy, and it can only occur in a setting of willing blindness.