"The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" contains one of the great movie lines: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
I love that line even though it stands a core belief of my blog on its head, which is: When legend (or myth) gets exposed by the facts, go with the facts. I love it because it reveals a truth about our human preference for good story over mundane reality. I love it because it explains so much of our most outrageous behavior, especially political behavior where fundamental falsehoods like WMD or mushroom clouds or “death panels” can swoop the entire body politic up into their imaginary clutches. I love it, too, because it helps set up my Memorial Day Church of Dan sermon on war.
I recently watched the outstanding documentary Restrepo about an American platoon dropped into the middle of Afghanistan’s Konengal Valley where they were under fire from the Taliban virtually everyday for 15 months. "Restrepo" plays it pretty straight as a documentary. The only agenda is to tell the story of these guys—warts and all. Though no pacifist I’m not much of a fan of war, still the film filled me with a genuine appreciation for the tenacity and bravery of the young men who had volunteered to confront the harshest, most frightening conditions in the bloom of their lives. I’m a skeptic about what they were doing there, but I couldn’t help but project how well they would have served a cause I more deeply believed in.
Which raises the question: were they serving legend or fact in Afghanistan? The climatic scene in the documentary comes after a hellacious fire-fight marked by civilian casualties and the loss of Rugal, their acknowledged best warrior (by the way, the film and the platoon’s hard-won outpost are named after PFC Restrepo, one of their first comrades to be killed). The troops are so shocked by the loss that one of them breaks down in tears on the battlefield. Later, back at the outpost, their captain, intent on getting them back into warrior mode, demands an answer to the question: why are we here? What follows is a very un-Boo-yah!-like moment where one subdued soldier struggles through the group solemnity to answer. "To fight for my country," he says.
According to polls a majority of the American public turned against the war in Afghanistan in 2009 shortly after the documentary was filmed--and before Osama bin Laden, the original reason for going there, was killed. That means most Americans haven’t felt they have a fight in Afghanistan for some time. Yet, if a filmmaker—or certainly a military officer--were to ask the troops why they’re there, the answer would probably be the same: To fight for my country. A case can be made, then, that the soldiers are fighting for a myth--the myth of America under siege from dark, alien, bloodthirsty killers (or against the legend of the Taliban as a ruthless, existential threat to America).
Can soldiers ever endure what they must endure if they don’t have a myth or legend to hold onto? Would it be possible to get 20-year olds to give up the comfort of home to be dropped into strange lands to kill foreigners without giving them a motivating myth? How much of the facts behind their mission do soldiers need or even want to do their duty? Would soldiers with a surer grasp of the geopolitical significance of Afghanistan and its historic immutability to invading armies be more or less prepared and/or willing to fight? We know that Pat Tillman was a soldier with just such a grasp and we know how he ended up.
I lean on Norman O. Brown for much guidance at my Church of Dan, but on the subject of war I find that Nobby has left a wee bit of confusion. On the one hand in "Love's Body" he writes, “War is war perverted. The problem is not the war but the perversion. And the perversion is a repression; war is sex perverted.” That’s Nobby letting his full frontal Freud hang out: War is a function of restless, unsated, swinging dicks. (And actually the testosterone on display in "Restrepo" sorta kinda conveys that.)
Yet almost immediately after that sentence in "Love's Body," Brown quotes a passage from William James’s “Remarks at the Peace Banquet.”
“The plain truth is that people want war. They want it anyhow: for itself, and apart from each and every possible consequence. It is the final bouquet of life’s fireworks. The born soldier wants it hot and actual. The non-combatant wants it in the background, and always as an open possibility, to feed his imagination. War is human nature at its uttermost. We are here to do our uttermost. It is a sacrament. Society would rot without the mystical blood payment.”
So what is it? Is war the result of repressed sexuality or is war the inevitable destiny for those born to be warriors? Personally I prefer to think that the ultimate path to universal, enduring peace is much more sex. That beats the Jamesian view that we will always have generational waves of warriors who will come into the world needing causa belli as much as they need mother’s milk.
The classically liberal view on this tends to be that war is a result of nurture, not nature. If we raised children in less aggressive and hostile environments, progressives believe, they would be less likely to become hostile and violent. Pemble is one of the kid soldiers featured in "Restrepo." On camera, with his weapon momentarily quiet and a shy smile, he describes his mom as a “fucking hippie” who wouldn’t even let him own a squirt gun while growing up. His recollection inspired memories of my own childhood which rarely found me without a toy gun or gun facsimile in hand…sometimes it actually was my hands. I still cannot look at these index fingers racing over my keyboard without thinking how nobly they served me as six-shooters in childhood. After watching John Wayne shoot ‘em up on the big screen or Guy Madison shoot ‘em up on the small screen, I was out and about the neighborhood shooting ‘em up myself. Yet, by the time I was 20, I was marching against the Vietnam War and have been marching against wars off and on pretty much ever since. So I try to keep the culture-made-us-do-it explanation for war in perspective. “Grand Theft Auto” had nothing to do with Bush and Cheney going half-cocks off to Iraq, and Stallone and Shwarzenegger movies had nothing to do with Obama going to Norway and wanking his little warrior off in the face of the international peace community.
The culture does contribute to the war-enabling myths though. Of all the effective spinning the American Conservative movement has achieved in the last 30 years or so, few have been as remarkable than the one about liberal Hollywood. Which brings us back to Liberty Valance. The film had a great theme song with a lyric that goes like this:
From out of the East a stranger came,
A law book in his hand, a man.
The kind of a man the west would need
To tame a troubled land;
Cause the point of a gun was the only law
That Liberty understood.
Simple song lyric, but it pretty much sums up Hollywood’s attitude on what really holds civilization together. Sure, the law is necessary, but it’s the gun that ultimately settles things. There are but a handful of movies in Hollywood history in which the workings of the judicial system prevail. For every "12 Angry Men" there are thousands of "Death Wish" movies and such where the law/the system has failed miserably to protect society and only the Shanes, the Dirty Harrys, and the Rambos can do the job with the catharsis and finality injustice cries for. Not to lean too heavily on a mere song lyric (and this is Burt Bachrach after all, not Dylan), but the final verse of the song bears attention. It goes:
The man who shot Liberty Valance,
He shot Liberty Valance,
He was the bravest of them all.
For those unfamiliar with the movie, it should be noted that in it James Stewart is the book-totin’ lawyer who’s trying to bring the outlaw Liberty Valance to justice according to the law. In the end he’s forced to abandon his law book and take up a gun to face Liberty Valance. He wins the face-off, and thus the legend is born. But the facts that don’t get printed are that John Wayne, playing a "good" gunslinger himself, has killed Liberty Valance with a shot taken from a hiding place. The bravest man of them all, whether it be the lawyer of the legend or the gunslinger of reality, is, in either case, the man who shoots Liberty Valance (or Osama bin Laden), not the one who brings him to justice. Justice, it seems, is more the beneficiary of violence than its master.
(And by the way, who better to star in these roles in such a movie than Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne. Stewart, playing the effete East Coast tenderfoot, while in real life being the guy who went well out of his way to get into World War II and finally succeeded in flying bombing missions over Germany. And then Wayne, his traditional role as the tough hombre who tames the West or wins every war he ever fights in, while in real life scrambling like a dirty fucking hippie to avoid the military.)
The epilog to "Restrepo" is that the US military shut down the outpost and pulled out of the Konengal Valley in 2010. There would be no more fighting for America on that particular rampart. As we honor the memory of PFC Restrepo and all the other dead soldiers this Memorial Day, we would do well to remember that every time men take up arms against each other irony flows as thick and fast as blood and tears on the battlefield. And that’s fact.