Here’s something that pisses me off. I mean, it’s cool and all to be making monster trucks for the vulnerable soldier sect, but what irks me is how this fellow was originally thinking more along the lines of a pimped-out, rap star-style ride. And now of course, he’s making a killing off the war.
Yes, I saw Why We Fight last week. And here we have some happy fluff about the military-industrial come to downtown Stillwater.
Why We Fight went out of its way to illustrate the prophesy in Eisenhower’s famous “military-industrial complex”-themed farewell speech–which strikes me as not an entirely difficult thing to illustrate. We’re surrounded by the corporatization of the military, even in a charmed, planned community on the outskirts of Stillwater. But there was another comment made in the film that struck a deeper chord, and I won’t be able to quote it verbatim.
The filmmaker spent much time with a one Karen Kwiotkowski, a retired Pentagon intelligent officer who resigned (after twenty years of service) at the onset of the Iraq War, once it donned on her how officials were interested in manipulating intelligence. Late in the film she said something along the lines of not allowing her sons to serve in the military because the U.S. military, as she sees it, is no longer interested in fighting to preserve freedom. Rather, soldiers are fighting to further the Bush Administration’s imperialistic agenda.
I have a photo album that my grandfather compiled after the three years he spent fighting in WWII. It’s a precious heirloom, made even more so because he painstakingly labeled and documented dates, places, even his moods. His little handwritten notes preserve something of my grandfather’s personality; so while I don’t remember him well (he died when I was eight), I feel as thought I’ve gotten to know him somehow by way of this book. He was an armorist so there are lots of pictures of old bombers. He got a picture of General Paton inspecting the troupes. He took pictures of obliterated cities. It’s a point of pride, and I like showing off the photo album.
My dad fought in Vietnam on the other hand, and all I have of that is a picture of him playing a guitar outside his bunker and looking twelve-years-old (in truth, he was nineteen at the time). Of course, I got to know my father much better as a person, but we spoke very little of his wartime experiences. The first thing I did once I got to college was take a “U.S. History from 1950” class, mostly because I wanted to study the Vietnam Era. But still, my dad wouldn’t discuss it with me. And from the little we did talk, I was able to gleam that he didn’t fully understand the politics that had sent him there. He died of lung cancer in 1999. He was a non-smoker. Because he was infected with some sort of aggressive, small-cell carcinoma, his oncologist believed the illness to be related to pesticide exposure in Vietnam. And for what? That, of course, really pisses me off.
