My HR told me I could no longer email bills, but instead had to give them the original paper. I’m afraid somebody there will have a heart attack when I tell them that that PDF file is the original.
I don’t think so. There’s this weird group of Hindu nationalists who think that this ancient civilization had all kinds of modern technology. Not just nukes- airplanes, computers, cars, etc.
William Faulkner has some wonderful stories about the WW1 days when people would go up in these rickety planes with a handgun, and take potshots with it with one hand while they flew the plane with the other, or take up a big basket of hand grenades and be lobbing them down at people on the ground while the people on the ground were shooting at them with infantry weapons.
Pilots in war have always been nuts, but there's levels of nuts.
I love seeing pictures of WW1 infantry preparing to let loose an anti-aircraft volley from their bolt-action rifles. What a wild time of military developments
Somewhere there is a Vietnam book where an American pilot told a story about "One-Shot Charlie". There was an old Vietnamese man in some village who had some kind of ancient rifle, and every time they were flying nearby, he'd come out of his house and fire a single shot at the aircraft going past him half a mile up or whatever, and then go back inside. Just kind of a "I hate the fuck out of you but all I have is this rifle but fuck yes I will do my part."
They loved him. They never tried to attack him and I think would have been legitimately angry if someone had tried to hurt him. When you are in war you find your moments of safety and humor where you can.
I think the only country that’s legit happened to was Iraq,
Usually it’s more about how traumatized the POWs captured by your country’s soldiers were. Unbroken being the major cinematic example, and all the stories about Senator McCain refusing early release and being tortured for it and the guy who blinked reports of torture out in morse code while reading a hostage statement in Vietnam being the more “stuff of legends” examples.
American Sniper is the only one I’ve seen where it’s about how some soldier who didn’t experience anything above the typical background humm of war felt about the whole thing.
Probably because being a US military troop is the least dangerous it’s ever been, so the major condition most troops will face isn’t death or permanent injury, but instead PTSD from having faced combat or Survivor’s guilt from having been suddenly shifted off the rare doomed mission or patrol that still claims casualties at the last second.
Most enlisted troops are just career workers in camo with a REALLY rigorous on the job fitness program. There’s a reason the US is everyone’s intel and logistics repository, and it’s because for every dollar spent on actually fighting, ten get spent on building up so much intelligence that the deck is as stacked as it can be before the cards even come out of the box to be dealt.
Vietnam movies were usually either about POW experiences or about the absolute pointlessness of it all, which doesn’t really line up with “bombing your country and then making movies about how sad it made them”
I have literally never seen a depiction of Vietnam that was positive or shy of direct condemnation of how terrible it all was.
Seriously, even Forrest Gump’s innocent portrayal of it still managed to underline in bold that it was all pointless, needless, and cruel beyond reason.
I have literally never seen a depiction of Vietnam that was positive or shy of direct condemnation of how terrible it all was.
Seriously, even Forrest Gump’s innocent portrayal of it still managed to underline in bold that it was all pointless, needless, and cruel beyond reason.
Not sure what about any of that doesn’t line up with “sad”. None of those adjectives border on happy or nonchalant.
Because that’s not “made the soldiers sad” it’s “this entire thing was awful and a fucking crime.”
You’re trying to insist that media that would agree that it was a bad thing is exploitation media because…it agrees with you?
It honestly seems like you’re just trying to argue because you don’t like someone pointing out that the meme isn’t fully accurate to what war media actually looks like historically and even today to some extent.
No, I think the main point in contention is mostly just that the experience of the American GIs are always centered in these tellings of the stories to american audiences, and obviously that’s going to whitewash a lot of the history and context of a conflict and just transform it into “I got stationed in a random place I hated for a couple years and then I had to kill a bunch of people for reasons I didn’t understand while they tried to kill all my friends and then I got back home and got jack shit for it”. And then on top of that, those movies are going to be a lot about the psychological trauma that’s inflicting on those particular american GIs, and often, again, without a broader context of what system they’re placed into, it’s just sort of like, turned into sanitized hollywood melodrama, much like how they’ll sanitize any historical fiction into being oscar bait.
Obviously that’s not gonna really be the same experience as, say, some random guerilla fighter somewhere, or some random person who just lives in one of these places. About the only movies I can think of that actually attempted to expand on that particular perspective was good morning vietnam, where that’s touched on, but not explored, and maybe the breadwinner, which is a pretty good movie but also more just adjacent to what I’m talking about rather than directly in dialogue with it. I might be wrong on that one though, it’s been a while since I’ve seen it even though that movie is fucking good and you should watch it.
That’s my recommendation. Go watch “the breadwinner”.
It’s not out of the question because Afghanistan were on our side back then, and by on our side, I mean America gave them weapons to fight the Russians, and then abandoned them immediately the second Russia gave up.
It’s just I’ve never seen any real evidence of it… It’s always just that one still which seems to be from a second or so before the real one.
I think you’re confusing Rambo First Blood, which is about how fucked up he was after coming back from Vietnam, with the Rambo sequels, which are about how cool it is to blow stuff up.
I don’t know about the others, but MAS*H seems to be heavily anti-war. Hawkeye obviously has deep contempt for the war and generals, and the more pro-war characters are decipted as insufferable pieces of shit.
As others have said there’s a bunch more, but the one that really grinds my gears is The Covenant
We really spent 20 years telling these terps they and their families would be safe, then just fucking left and made a MOVIE about that shitty bullshit underhanded move?
Put every single goddamn joint chief in front of congress and ask why this is a fictional tale
Honestly what gets me about evac failures and abandonments is the Berlin Airlift.
We had the logistics to mount a months long rescue operation that could get everyone fleeing out decades before these rushed withdrawals.
Everyone in Saigon and Kabul could have been gotten out, fuck we could have mounted a rolling evac bringing collaborators behind lines and transporting them in a trickle so that the last folks out are in a relatively empty air schedule. Expanding and contracting sphere, keep everyone who’s in it willingly behind the line so long as they willingly continue to move with it.
We go in get the resource then leave. Werner van Braun got a first class ticket to the US
Soldiers in the sandbox were playing COD on Xboxes in the hooch before going out to a real life version where people lived in bombed out huts, then promising if you work with us you’ll get a better life in America
The US military has many faults but logistics is not one. Every single terp and their cousin could be living in Milwaukee right now…but we fucking chose not to.
Pushing functional birds off a carrier deck to make room for people is the definition of Churchill’s quote. Americans will do the right thing after exhausting every other option.
This presupposes that every single person working to make change in their home is willing to just up and leave at a moments notice (or years in advance, which kind of undermines the entire motive to want to effect change, again in their home)
I’d imagine all but the densest motherfuckers on the face of the earth would see that the force standing between them and summary execution at best is calling the retreat and realize the value of being alive somewhere else vs dying on the patch of dirt you happened to feel the most attached to at that moment.
Yes, definitely aliens, because no way did those Brown people ever come up with how to build such complex structures. Nope. Definitely aliens. White aliens at that. Probably from the Anglo Saxon galaxy.
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