The Persian Gulf War now has its own war movie.
Though the Pentagon withdrew its support for “Courage Under Fire” (which opens Friday) when director Ed Zwick refused to allow military script censorship, it’s a uniquely honest, fictional look at the American fighting man and woman of today–and at the month-and-a-half long desert conflict that so riveted Americans a mere five years ago.
No American war seems complete without a movie. The national memory of World War II, Korea and Vietnam would not be the same without such films as John Wayne’s “Sands of Iwo Jima,” Gregory Peck’s “Pork Chop Hill,” and Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” or Stanley Kubrick’s classic “Full Metal Jacket.”
Even the silly and near tragic Grenada invasion of 1983, which saw more medals awarded than there were troops in action, had its own war movie: Clint Eastwood’s equally silly “Heartbreak Ridge.”
“Courage Under Fire” isn’t like that. It puts a human face on a war that was presented to the home front as a sort of video game. It grapples with the true nature of battlefield courage and with what is required for decent young American men and women to get up on a morning and go kill fellow human beings, and risk the same fate for themselves.
“I don’t think we the public got a very rounded picture of what happened in the Gulf,” said Zwick, whose credits include the Civil War movie “Glory” and television’s “thirtysomething.” “I think what we saw were a very artfully packaged series of photo opportunities and sound bites, most of which were prepared by the Department of Defense with the legacy of pool journalism.
“We never saw a human face, really. We never saw a dead (American) body. We never saw much that seemed messy, and wars are messy. They’re not pretty. Once I decided to do it, I certainly felt there was an obligation to portray a complicated and textured canvas, rather than something simple.”
The movie deals in a very serious way with the issue of women in combat, with the high risk of friendly fire casualties because of the increased lethality of high-tech weaponry, as well as with the question of moral and public accountability by the U.S. military’s top brass–and its lack.
“Courage” marks a career turn for Meg Ryan, who puts aside the “cute” persona of so many light romantic comedies to play a dead woman, Army medevac helicopter pilot Capt. Karen Walden, who is killed in the attempted rescue of the crew of another chopper downed behind Iraqi lines.
Cited for unusual bravery, she is being posthumously considered for the Medal of Honor, which would make her first woman ever to receive one. The film’s plot unfolds as veteran tank officer Lt. Col. Nathaniel Serling (Denzel Washington) is assigned to investigate her case.
With Ryan getting to play the same series of gut-wrenching, profanity-screaming combat scenes over and over–each time differently–the recountings of the tale are told in “Rashamon” style, from conflicting and flatly contradictory points of view.
“I really wanted to do it,” Ryan said in an interview in Washington. “I thought the challenge was great because I’d never done anything like that before and I was thinking how do you communicate a character with basically one scene? She has to be so different in these three different things.”
A storm of research
Except for the opening tank battle, which director Zwick concedes was staged in cheek-by-jowl Hollywood cavalry charge style rather than with widely dispersed tactical reality, the combat scenes are all focused on the marooned group with the helicopters.
The verisimilitude of war here is overpowering, in large part because Zwick kept the focus so much on a few individual soldiers. You can hear every round fired. You can taste the dust and feel the fear. And when Ryan is killed, she seems very, very dead, shockingly dead, though you’ve known she’s deceased from the beginning.
“We did a tremendous amount of research,” said Washington, “spending days with soldiers in the field, talking in offices with officers, going to doctors in psychiatric treatment centers, to find out what’s true and not true.”
He said that knowing this was the first major movie ever made on the Persian Gulf War made him feel particularly obligated to present it as accurately as possible.
“I had an ever-increasing sense of responsibility as I got to know the soldiers,” he said. “As I got to know men that talked about their friends who didn’t come back. You meet these guys who make 25,000 bucks a year and put their lives on the line constantly, and then look you in the eye and give you everything they have, and they were giving me everything. I left there wanting to do right by them, wanting to show them as they are.”
He said everyone worked hard to avoid anything resembling the traditional Hollywood rat-a-tat-tat toy soldier action hero movie.
Washington stood up against two other Hollywood cliches–a fist fight between his character, a high-ranking officer, and a sergeant, played by Lou Diamond Phillips; as well as dialogue in which his character, Col. Serling, mouthed anti-war platitudes.
“I knew, with all the research I was doing, this man would never say this,” Washington said. “He’s a career soldier. He’s not in there reluctantly. This is his life. This is what he knows. Serling is proud of that.”
He said every real soldier he talked to insisted that the fist fight would never happen, that it would be a serious military infraction.
“I found out how a soldier could pray, then turn around and say, `Let’s kill,’ ” Washington said. “So I put that in there. `God protect us against our enemies. All right, good, Amen. Now let’s go kill everybody.’ “
Women under fire
Though the Army later withdrew its technical support and combat equipment because Zwick refused to make deletions and changes in the script requested by the Pentagon, the cast did get to train with actual soldiers, at what Phillips called “Boot Camp Lite.”
“We worked with a S.W.A.T team,” Phillips said. “They took us on ride arounds, firing live rounds out of machine guns, getting the feel of being a unit and watching a real unit work. All of this plays into the film. When you see this movie for the first time, you have to accept it as the truth. . . . It’s about avoiding mortar shells and yelling and screaming and firing machine guns. The characters all exhibit their guilt and defeat in different ways.”
Washington drove M-1 Abrams tanks, qualified firing their cannons and fired .50 caliber machine guns. Ryan underwent weapons training, and prepared herself with a rigorous physical training course.
“She could do more push-ups than I could,” Washington said. “It was embarrassing.”
Ryan took seriously the fact that this is the first film to deal with the still highly controversial issue of women in combat.
“As war matures, it becomes less and less about brute strength and more and more about when to push that button,” she said. “So all the arguments about physical capability (are moot). I mean, I can shoot an M-16. There’s no kick. It’s horrifyingly easy to shoot.
“The more I got into it, the more I learned what it takes–philosophically. I had a very hard time wrapping my head around the military mentality at all. Paradoxically, you can’t help but admire the selflessness of being able to say you’re willing to die for an idea and you might not come home that day, on the other hand, you might go to work and kill someone.”
She said today’s leftist-oriented feminists could take a lesson from America’s military women.
“The military is thought of as such a right-wing bastion. The women’s movement has ignored the women in the military, and yet these women are in this incredibly patriarchal, hierarchal, entrenched institution, and they’re making big strides in it–alone.”
Yet Ryan felt she could understand the trouble male soldiers have in dealing with women.
“There’s this idea that it’s all about brotherly love, being in the comradeship of your troop and your unit,” she said. “That’s the thing that allows you to go and kill for the sake of protecting people and this idea of country.
“So when women get introduced into that kind of cohesive unit, a sexual element gets put into that idea of brotherly love, it messes up that thing that seems to be so necessary. That’s what this resistance is to women being in there.”
Now that she has made this singular film and come to understand so much, could she now countenance the possibility of having made the choice to go into the military herself?
“Never,” Ryan said coldly. “For me, never.”
