On Sunday, Australia’s Brisbane Times reported that native son Michael Ware believes that he filmed a war crime while covering Iraq for CNN. The station, wich claimed the footage was too graphic, refused to air it and neither was it investigated by authorities. (You may also remember Ware when he found himself in the midst of a “steamy Baghdad love triangle,” as Huffington Post called it, with CBS’s now chief foreign affairs correspondent Lara Logan.) For more about the troubling — understatement, if ever there was one — incident, follow the Brisbane Times link.
Thanks to that incident and others, Ware suffers from severe Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Mens’s Journal explains in a December 2008 article.
To begin to understand where he’s coming from, Ware wants you to see a movie. He filmed it. It’s just after midnight during the second battle of Fallujah, November 2004. The marine unit he’s hooked up with has cornered six insurgents inside a house, and with no air support available, the only way to take them out is person-to-person.
Follow the Men’s Journal link for more of what Ware experienced. Meanwhile, here’s what he wants you to understand.
Ware believes he recorded the perfect war experience that night [and] dreams of renting out a theater and subjecting an audience to it in full surround sound. . . . “It’s my firm belief that we need to constantly jar the sensitivities of the people back home,” he says. “. . . when your brothers and sons and mates from the football team come home, and they ain’t quite the same, you have an obligation to sit for three and a half minutes and share something of what it’s like to be there.”
In theory, that’s a good idea. But, while I don’t know about Australians, I’m not sure that would work with Americans. First, we’re already inured to stimuli overload from video games, IMAX movies, and film experiences like Avatar. Second, there still exist those who believe of our military: “Well he knew what he was getting into — he signed up for it, didn’t he?”
Worse, Ware (by no means a dove, incidentally) is asking us to do something impossible for many Americans: hold two ideas in our head at the same time. His imagined film is meant to help us see the war through the eyes of the coalition forces, but the war crime he’s revealing seems to seek sympathy for Iraqis. Americans, though, are congenitally incapable of empathizing with Iraqis. We believe that, by deposing Saddam, we handed them their freedom on a silver platter. What did they decide to do with it? Take advantage of the occasion to blow each other up and make it rain body parts on a regular basis.
Many of us will never grasp what A.J. Rossmiller wrote about what we did to Iraq in Still Broken: A Recruit’s Inside Account of Intelligence Falures, From Baghdad to the Pentagon (Presidio Press, 2008): “. . . it takes a special kind of idiot to push an egg off a table and then blame the egg for exploding into a mess.”