The Killing and the Betrayal of Hollywood

A question I pondered over while watching a Maroon 5 music video where the main character has been shot in the arm and is being chased by the police. Is this factually correct? Or is it filled with Hollywood myth? My son is 9 and I told him that the video was a load of rubbish and incorrect. I can see parallels to this video to the John Wayne cinema flicks that many aspiring Americans watched prior to enlisting in 1960s USA. I bet they felt betrayed by Hollywood during their Baptism of Fire in the sticky jungles of Vietnam. The futility of battle and the ugly cold face of fear that we’ve all been conditioned with is all too apparent and pathetic when you compare it to the big screen. I believe that we just aren’t the cold blooded killers many of these movies portray us to be. You've seen many a film where the soldiers are shooting the enemy and the enemy are dropping dead. You’ve got the likes of Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone wielding big guns and killing people.

A complete lie and pure fantasy. People just don't drop dead as soon as a piece of metal enters their body. Sometimes they don't know they've been hit until it becomes apparent that their boot is filling with blood or they simply pass out. I get loads of people ask if I killed anyone simply because I’ve been in the Army. I shock them with the truth which is, no. I have however had the rare opportunity of opening fire with my rifle (it jammed as well) – I didn’t see who was firing at the base, but I fired in the general direction as is normally the case and I think this has the technical term of 'posturing'.

In a culture that’s reading this – I don’t think we’ve got the stomach for killing anymore. We’ve been molly coddled out of that primal, savagery by machines that do the work for us. We’ve gradually retracted from the blade and lance and replaced it with arrow, rifle, missile, rocket, Germ and Chemicals. We’ve distanced ourselves from the haunting gaze of the victim of our death dealing blows, maybe we’ve been haunted by our ancestor’s inability to talk about their experiences and the ‘horror’ they encountered with butchery and barbarity. A pivoting point in history, perhaps was on the upturned fields of france during the opening decades of the 20thCentury. The Machine Gun against a British ramrod straight, disciplined, gentleman like act of approaching the enemy from the line of march.

Mown down in thousands, the British had to rethink strategies to counter this after millions of casualties. The Germans’ it seemed embraced new technology and embraced a new strategy (blitzkrieg) in WW2 – innovation and risk taking paid dividends in life, space and time for their campaigns. The Polish Uhlan Lancers, magnificent in their charge towards the Mechanized German Army in the opening days of September 1940, only to be turned into a decimated rout. They would have been formidable give a 100 years previously, but the advent of electricity, the engine, self loading rifles and air would make the mounted charge somewhat obsolete.

The survivors of these wars paid the price of being shunned by the largely ignorant masses who were protected by the inadequacy of media coverage and governmental propaganda to keep the people under control. Had they known, then maybe they wouldn’t have had the stomach for it.

There are two books, On Killing, by Dave Grossman and another one Acts of War, by Richard Holmes, they go into great detail on the act of killing. A couple of things I found interesting was that less than 1% of servicemen during WW2 were actually in combat and an even smaller percentage fired their rifle. Many chose not to open fire and were killed through that action alone.

Despite all the efforts of previous generation we cannot shrug off that morbid curiosity that grips us when a conflict arises. Warnings from history, Remarque and a whole host of other authors who wrote of the horrors of WW1 could not stop the tide of desire to see the horror firsthand. And when their naivety has been shot out of the boy, the horror is ever present in their eyes and it seldom stays with them to the grave. The trauma of killing another human being even in the skies above Tokyo in the bucking and jostling B29 strategic bombers, through the updraft of the heat. Many pilots have the smell of burning flesh in their minds, and like the smell of a building long after its fire has been put out, you can never truly get rid of the smell.

We’re simply not used to seeing the Human form pulled apart in a violent act. Even worse, when we see a body torn apart we don’t expect the victim to survive and when they do, for that small minute we shall endure it for our time here. We will wake every morning and see the dying face of our enemy or our friend, we will hear them cry for their Mother. Despite what you see in the newspapers and hear. People will find comfort in their Mothers before dying. It’s the single most, unique feeling they’re going to have, it’s a journey they’ve questioned and never really had the answer to. Nobody has ever had the answer to it... When we’re scared it will happen. We become a mess of blood, tears, vomit and bile. We don’t want to tell their family that they lost control and cried to the bitter end, holding on with everything and cursing the world at the same time.

There are some startling figures out there and the rate of suicides amongst veterans after a conflict usually outweighs the combat deaths. A source in 2009 stated that an estimated 264 Falklands War veterans had committed suicide since the end of the war compared to the 255 killed due to action. The US don’t get off lightly here, despite their Armed Forces’ gung-ho external appearance they are just as human as the British, conditioned to an age of technological killing machines honed to do the dirty work. Various reports estimate that the US suffered from 150,000 to 200,000 suicides from Vietnam Veterans compared to the 58,000 killed in action. Maybe we should alter the Killed In Action figures as many of the men and women coming home still fight the war long after the politicians have declared hostilities over.

During World War 2, the German Einsatzgruppe (Extermination Squads) were often subjected to the psychological impact of their mass murder. Even these ideologically driven people were starting to lose it. A vehicle especially designed to kill its occupants (only one of its kind made, I believe) was made to alleviate the members of this group. We see this occurring in Steven Spielburg’s ‘Schindler’s List’ near the end when the bodies of the concentration camp victims are being burnt and some of the German men are screaming. Despite all the horror and the many Megadeaths we made over the past Millenia or two the effects take root and often kill us after the killing has stopped.

We as humans have been conditioned by our own genius; we have constructed machinery to make killing a lot more effective; from the Bow to the Neutron Bomb. We’ve been kept away, on the whole, from the Hand-to-Hand combat. There will be times when Hand-to-Hand (Bayonet / CQB) will happen, but on the whole, we kill at a distance. We are mentally shielded by space and the myopic veil that blocks out our need to reason with why we had to kill. Still the youth will want to barge into a compound with grenade and gun, clear it out, like the Hollywood stars and I bet... I just bet, that if any of those Hollywood stars were sent over to Afghanistan to take on a group of Taliban fighters that Arny or Sly or whoever would quake in their boots.