A WONDERFUL GIFT IGNORED

I just watched Werner Herzog's film, RESCUE DAWN, based on a documentary he made a decade ago, LITTLE DIETER HAS TO FLY, the story of a German-American citizen, Navy flier, and test pilot, Dieter Dengler. Each is a remarkable, unique film imbued with the ferocity and intelligence inherent in Herzog's eye on human experience and nature.
RESCUE DAWN is made according to a classic Hollywood template -- the great escape. As an exemplar it is among the best ever made. This is the reason I expect it has been ignored. Because Dengler is a hero, who successfully escapes from North Vietnamese captivity in Laos, the critics may have assumed that this is a pro-war film, tacitly supporting the war in Iraq. This alone explains why the reviews are pallid. Too bad, because this film is first of all a wonderful adventure story -- Christian Bale gives an Oscar-worthy performance as do several of the supporting actors. It offers an unvarnished look at men at war. And most important, it provides us with a profoundly empathic view of what torture is, how it affects people in different ways, and what it makes people do and not do.
I do not presume to know what is going on in Werner Herzog's mind. I do not know what are his political views. Nor do I know how anyone could support how President Bush has conducted American foreign and security policy since September 11, 2001. As far as I can tell the Iraq War has been America's exit strategy from Central Europe. Not more and not less. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, our national security doctrine lost its rationale. President Clinton cut the military by four divisions but kept all of the weapons programs in place, as if nothing had changed. No review was undertaken. Clinton ignored the 1993 bombing of the WTC and both Clinton and Bush ignored persistent warnings about plane hijackings which have been a feature of global terrorism since the 1970s. 9/11 revealed that our national security administration is braindead. Despite a national commission investigating the events of that day which transformed the world, we are still in the dark about who knew what and who did what. The Commission concluded that EVERYONE was responsible, thus exonerating all.
Werner Herzog uses RESCUE DAWN to comment slyly and with an unblinking eye at the underlying realities which are ignored in the hysterical and hypocritical harangues that pass for debate now. Here are some facts. Dieter Dengler is sent on a bombing mission into Laos, a country which is at peace with the U.S. He is to bomb supply routes used by the North Vietnamese to supply their fighters in South Vietnam. His mission is secret and illegal. His phosphorous bombs are dropped on villages indiscriminately. Who is a civilian, who is a combatant? Dengler is captured and imprisoned with several other American and allied combatants who are routinely tormented, starved, beaten and threatened. Dengler refuses to sign a statement condemning his actions and the U.S. which would have spared him. Among other things we see a version of water-boarding. If you doubt this is torture, take a look. But that is not the point. Everything Dengler and his fellow prisoners experience is torture. They are living under the threat of execution. Their existence is denied by the United States! From the first day Dengler is determined to escape because he is a warrior, surrender is not in his nature. He finally convinces the others to support him when they learn that the guards have decided to kill them all so they can return to their home villages in search of food. They are not quite as hungry as the Americans, but they are hungry.
The prisoners are from one point of view, war criminals. They have killed civilians in an undeclared war. They have. Are they terrorists? Are they Capitalist Pigdog Lackeys? They are all of these things to someone. But they are first of all young men trying to survive. It is a commonplace of the nondebate about our policy that everyone supports the troops. Well, maybe the best way to support the troops is to understand why they are doing what they are doing. In this film, Herzog shows us: they are trying to stay alive. There are three Americans, each has a different strategy. One wants to make nice to the enemy until he learns they plan to kill him. One wants to give up. They both die. One is determined to escape. He survives not because he is a hero but because he is fortunate. And his supreme efforts to survive make it possible for good fortune to occur. And that is it.
To me the most interesting question raised by this excellent film is why it has been ignored. Everything in it is human. There are no special effects. There are no tricks. There are just people operating from human motives, doing things that humans at war have been doing for millenia. Millions trudge to see movies about Romans, Spartans, Space Invaders, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, but given a chance to see a film about the boys next door -- they stay away in droves. If you really care about the troops, if you really support them, it is IMPERATIVE to understand what they are being asked to do in our name. We seem to not really care which is why we are wasting our national treasure and our youth on inexplicable follies like the Battle of Falujah and the Bombing of Laos.
We need desperately to have a real debate on national security. We need a policy from which we can craft a national defense budget that is not just subsidies for congressional districts. And we need it soon or we are going to be the Sole Superpower whose only card will be nuclear weapons and a Security Council veto. And we will have defeated ourselves, just like the New England Patriots.