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What Makes a Good Soldier? What Makes a Good Murderer?
I've seen a lot of war movies, but this is a great one:
http://thegoodsoldier.com
This is the story of real veterans of U.S. wars, including Michael McPhearson whom many of us know as a leader in Veterans for Peace. These are veterans who have come to an understanding that war is all about training and compelling human beings to become murderous animals, and that the damage is deep even for those least harmed by this project, namely the killers themselves.
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Stay warm this winter in a black hooded sweatshirt. Order one. Order them by the dozen and donate them to occupations!
I viewed the trailer available at the documentary website and it's very short, so did some Web searches to find some longer excerpts and found two, one at Youtube that, I think anyway, is a little longer (5:35), as well as an excerpt at PBS from a Bill Moyers Journal airing of the documentary (11:32).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_GF-Bf5Mqc
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11062009/profile.html
I'm not going to re-view the three clips again to be certain of this, but believe they're all worth viewing for anyone who doesn't get a full copy. I'm pretty sure that it's clearly a very good and important documentary and that the two above clips differ; that what's shown in the Youtube clip has content not appearing in the PBS clip, and (clearly) vice versa, since the PBS clip is more than twice as long. And, perhaps, what's shown in the trailer at thegoodsoldier.com also provides a part or some parts of the full copy not shown in either of the clips at YT or PBS.
Two or three of the veterans speaking in this documentary, and based on these three clips, strike me as having serious difficulty living with what they did and were part of in the war contexts described; at least one of the veterans from the Vietnam War, actually both of them, and the veteran from the present war on Iraq. The veteran from WW II is more happy, but he also doesn't describe massacring innocent people; only describing how he was hit with shrapnel from a bomb explosion and how he was rescued; leaving it understandable that he's happy. But this is only according to these three clips from the full copy; being unable to speak about what appears or is said in the rest.
Now that it comes back to mind, one of the vets from the Vietnam War doesn't seem to have difficulty like of a breakdown sort, but does express serious anger about orders to kill innocent people, say.
Mike Corbeil