Movie Review: Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

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This is a really great action science fiction (SF) movie, capturing very well – through its sights, sounds, and story action – the authentic chaos, the confusion, and the quick, quick, too quick terror of immediate combat reality.  It puts you squarely into the war zone with no rescue possible.  It is one of Tom Cruise’s better roles in recent years, primarily because of the fine story writing history.  But for me it is Emily Blunt who really stood out as a warrior heroine, and seeing her performance here was the main event even though Cruise has the featured role. 

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The premise of Edge of Tomorrow is based on the short Japanese SF novel, All You Need Is Kill (2004), by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  The film also gives homage to other classic war movies, e.g., briefly to Platoon (1986) but more especially to Saving Private Ryan (1998). 

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Part of the story’s appeal is that it has a “time loop” somewhat like the film Groundhog Day (1993), always setting the protagonist (Cruise) back a day.  But it’s not funny.  It’s terrifying.  Cruise keeps getting reset back to the day before the combat action that he knows will certainly kill him in some ghastly new way each time.  Over and over again.  The only virtue of this repeated time loop is that he remembers each earlier time and thus may possibly learn from his past mistakes, kind of like one’s feeble attempts at karmic improvement while struggling and stumbling on through endless Samsara. 

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The human warriors fight ruthless alien invaders, and they are physically reinforced by powered armor exoskeletons as originally inspired by Robert Heinlein’s classic 1959 SF novel Starship Troopers (but it’s best to forget that dreadful movie with the same name).  The odds are against humanity, and it looks like extinction for us. 

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Emily Blunt is fantastic as a warrior who fights individually with a heroic ferocity that reminds me of Homeric times, e.g., the desperate combats on the beach at Troy.  An epic heroine, she kicks ass and inspires the human fighters in their grim defensive cause.  They call her the “Full Metal Bitch” and are in absolute awe of her prowess.  Her performance is one of the best female action roles I’ve seen in a while.  Still, as my cousin Holly remarked, Blunt’s character inevitably seems to play second fiddle to that of Cruise, the great established male Hollywood mega-star. 

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We need more heroines in literature and film.  Intelligent steely-eyed warrior women with individual courage, independent vision, and sovereign executive judgment.  In the Western tradition, we only have a few and their roles have been much too brief:  e.g., the Amazon queen Penthesilea, the Greek goddess Artemis, Joan of Arc, Spenser’s Belphoebe and Britomart, etc.  Even Ayn Rand dropped the ball when penning her great heroic females, having them bow too much to their men in the end. 

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(My perspective, above, is more of a long-range historical one.  However, isolated SF, action, thriller, and dramatic books and films in recent decades actually have produced some remarkably great heroines, and I would really like to recollect and catalog them into a personal Heroine Hall of Fame someday.  Any suggestions for my list?  Please help me here.) 

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Tom Cruise is best when he precedes his heroics by playing an unsavory person, in this case a cowardly weasel and a very reluctant hero.  (Tom is experiencing low ebb in his stardom these days, possibly because of the unpopularity of his real-life persona as a complete $cientology dickhead.  Katie showed him the door with great intelligence and resolve.  Go, Katie!) 

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This is science fiction, but when Tom shows up in the first scenes in a bastardized knockoff of a USMC officer’s uniform, it made me want to puke.  But the Corps et al is redeemed in the scene(s) when Tom wakes up handcuffed and disgraced, and an NCO with a naval-block cover yells at him, “On your feet, maggot!”  (Ah, sweet Parris Island nostalgia.) 

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And Bill Paxton gives a supporting performance here that is an absolute classic.  His role as Master Sergeant Farell is one with such an absurd mock-military attitude that it makes me want to smile with every bit as wide of a shit-eating grin as his.  He’s a master. 

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But it is Emily Blunt who steals the show.  See the movie on DVD. 

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-Zenwind.

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Atheist in a Foxhole

This is my experience as a teenage Marine who was totally convinced that he would die in combat before the night was over while alone in a dark, wet foxhole and contemplating whether God(s) existed or not.  Late 1969, Hill 55 area, Quang Nam Province, Republic of Viet Nam. 

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A common allegation amongst god-fearing folks often reads like this:  “There are no atheists in the foxholes” – implying that the experience of fear when coming immediately close to near-certain death in combat will change all skeptics into true believers.  It implies that those who, in safer situations, may reject supernatural beliefs in deities, in beliefs in Heaven and Hell, and in Judgment Day, etc., will nevertheless change their tune when face to face with the immense looming probability of death, and they will opt for blind faith and plead to a god for deliverance.  Fear will turn them to faith.

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This is probably true for many.  But for me it has never been true, and any of these liars who claim that it is a universal truth where not in the same foxhole with me when such situations actually happened. 

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In combat zones, a sudden ambush (day or night) is electrifying beyond anything imaginable -- often emptying one's bladder and/or bowels -- and at those times questions of theology did not come up (at least to me), simply because you don’t have time to think about them.  I vividly remember one night, earlier in my tour (in the Hill 34 area), being pinned down by enemy automatic fire that came as close as six inches from my head – I still remember a buddy and me hugging the ground helplessly after we were caught by surprise, faces only a foot apart, while watching and hearing enemy tracer rounds whipping over each other’s heads.  At that time, and similar times of sudden danger, it never occurred to me to think about gods. 

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But it was much different when we had a long time to wait for near-certain death, to wait and to think, to endure those long, long stretches of time when the enemy was undoubtedly right there upon us but invisible in the dark and close by in the silence, lusting to kill your sorry soul.  When will they hit us?  When will they overrun us?  How in the hell will we ever get out of this one alive?  Will I ever live to see another dawn?  Times like these – when one had time to think of looming death – were times of despair, but were sometimes also a chance for lucid philosophical reasoning.  There was one night that defines it and sums it all up for me. 

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 We had been constantly attacked every night by enemy assaults, often under their mortar and rocket barrage.  This particular night was a moonless one, dark, windy and raining extremely hard – a “black rain” – with zero visibility.  Several of us were pulled out of our familiar trenches to march over and beyond the hill to reinforce a perimeter on a distant northern ridge.  The terrain was completely unknown to us, rocky and uneven, so we each grasped onto the fighting harness of the man in front of us and marched – tripping and stumbling – on into the blackness.  Eventually we were briefed by a Gunnery Sergeant, who gave us the sobering straight dope:  intelligence said that there was a division of NVA (the tough North Vietnamese Army) in the province, moving under the heavy weather and intent upon overrunning all nearby fire bases.  Gunnies do not get rattled easily, but this one was very concerned. 

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We reinforcements were split up and assigned to various posts.  I was assigned to two Marines on a position on the dark perimeter, and, as I was the one most ignorant of the terrain, they assigned me to man a crawl-hole position (a shallow foxhole bunker) to man the Claymore mine detonators.  The only arms we had were our M-16s and some hand grenades.  (I had no M-79 this night.) 

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The foxhole was a low shallow bunker that one man could crawl into, with very low sandbag walls front, left and right, and a corrugated steel roof with sandbags overhead.  Lying on my belly I could easily look up over the walls.  It was filled up with rainwater and too small for comfort.  In front of my face on the front wall were three Claymore detonators, but I wasn’t sure where the mines were positioned in the wire in front of me.  My two fellow Marines said that they would take up positions left and right of me behind rocks, and that was the last human contact I had.  The rest of the night was one of long solitary darkness – before the shit hit the fan. 

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I lay on my belly in the water of the crawl-hole and waited with zero vision ahead because of the constant black rain.  Then long after midnight it started to happen.  Between gusts of wind I heard unmistakable running foot treads of many men running from my left to my right in front of me – out somewhere invisible beyond 30 meters in front and outside the wire.  I heard many heavy feet on wet earth, heard someone shouting in Vietnamese (as if in urgent commands), and heard the clanking sounds of many alloy metal rifle ammo magazines (AK-47) – heavily laden troops with multiple bandoleers of ammo.  The group that first ran by my front was at least a couple of dozen, a platoon.  Then silence.  And wait. 

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I did not detonate the Claymore mines, nor did any other foxholes along the line, because the enemy was not (to our knowledge) inside our wire yet.  Long-standing orders of the day (from Commander-in-Chief down) were for extreme fire-discipline, i.e., to minimize any actions that would give away our positions.  Do not fire without a definite target, do not give yourself away.  And Claymores have brilliant flashes. 

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Sometime later in that endless night, a second group of NVA troops (another platoon) ran heavily from my left to my right out in front of me with commanders yelling and bandoleers clanking (“ka-chunka-ka-chunka-chunka”).  Then it was black rain darkness, and again silence except for the wind and driving rain.  Where are they?  At what point in our perimeter will they attack?  We were waiting for them to overrun our positions and kill us all.  No target, no knowledge.  Silence.  Terror. 

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Because there was such a long wait time between events, I had time to think fully about the situation.  First, at this position on an isolated ridge, we were spread pathetically thin – and the enemy knew this – and in the black rain darkness they could cut through the wire and infiltrate our perimeter and kill all of us in this sector.  Their concentrated numbers, and our thin spread, put us in a losing position with no way out.  I could not imagine any scenario that would have me living to see dawn.  I would die this night – I accepted that as a complete certainty. 

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It was the long wait time that made it possible for me to be philosophical.  My mind was racing on three levels:  sensory alertness; tactical combat knowledge review; and philosophical thinking.

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On the first level, the sensory level, my eyes and ears were like radar, head moving back and forth trying to pick up sights (near impossible in the black rain) and sounds.  The wind and rain drowned out most sounds, and I felt cut off from all senses except lying alone in a hole filled with cold water.  I was hyper-alert and charged with adrenaline. 

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On the tactical level, I remembered everything taught in Infantry Training.  I fixed my bayonet, a pathetic six-inch thing for the M-16.  I also had a nicely balanced five-inch Pilot Survival Knife (which I had won in a drawing) which I stuck into a timber for quick reach.  I mentally rehearsed all the drills on clearing a jam in an M-16; deploying hand grenades; first-aid to stop bleeding; how to withstand the concussion of close explosions (hands tightly over ears, open mouth); and, most dreadful of all scenarios, hand-to-hand bayonet or knife fighting on slippery ground.  I thought that, although it was certain that I would die before dawn, I was grimly determined that I would fight tooth and nail to survive.  I will not go down without a fight! 

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On the philosophical level, consciousness was more unhurried, relaxed, and controlled, and because of the long silent dark wait after those first sounds of enemy movement, it was very thoroughly thought out. 

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My hybrid Zen/Hinayana Buddhist practice has always been an atheistic one with absolutely no supernatural beliefs such as reincarnation, deities, miracles, prayers, etc.  On this night it integrated my three consciousness levels of the sensory, the tactical, and the philosophical. 

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Philosophically, I am thinking:  I will die this night and never see another dawn.  (Meanwhile eyes and ears are like radar; tactical considerations are constantly available for review.)  Although I am not passively going out without a fight, a rational review of the situation points to my immediate death.  My life will end.  This is when people are said to analyze their beliefs about death. 

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What happens to a human when they die?  Is their conscious self (their “soul,” mind, esprit, or geist) extinguished, annihilated?  Or is it “reborn” somehow, surviving death in some mystical way such as “resurrection” or “reincarnation”?  Is theism true?  Are there gods?  Is there a Last Judgment?  Will I be sent to be tortured in Hell forever because I do not believe in a God or gods?  (I had been an atheist, completely lacking any belief in gods, since I was 17.)  This seemed like a good time to review these issues, and adrenaline was making me wide awake. 

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Many versions of Pascal’s Wager came clearly into my consciousness during this night.  E.g., if I lack belief and it turns out that gods are most probably a fantasy, then I lose nothing and have lived a life free of superstition.  But if I lack belief and it turns out that I’m wrong and that gods indeed do exist, then I am doomed to Hell, shit out of luck. 

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During this my last night alive, I looked carefully and fairly at all of the arguments I knew that asserted the Existence of God, and I found them seriously lacking.  All of them.  As death threatened me with severe immediacy, I decided that I was indeed going to die this night as an atheist – an “atheist in a foxhole”, thus falsifying that particular theist myth; this made me chuckle, while being fully aware of the dark irony of it.  But I would die with a rational confidence in my own honest and sovereign judgment. 

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I also thought that, even if I was mistaken and if God really did exist to judge me, he had to recognize that my lack of belief was an honest judgment on my part, honestly reasoned according to the evidence I had seen, or not seen, and with my complete openness and objectivity.  (And I saw faith, believing without evidence, as an act of telling a lie to oneself and to the world.)  If God still considered my lack of belief to be a terrible sin, in spite of my honest inquiries, and if he still thought me worthy of Hell, then he was an unjust tyrant with no moral right to run a universe of rational beings.  I would repudiate such a being for his utter unfairness, injustice and barbaric cruelty. 

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After as honest and thorough a philosophical/ theological review as I could undertake, I felt quite tranquil about the notions of God, life after death, Hell, “eternal destinies”, etc. – i.e., I rejected them as most probably being fantasies because I found no convincing evidence to believe them, and I saw death as most likely being nothing but dreamless annihilation of self.  (No brain, no consciousness.)  I was not afraid of death as an atheist.  My coming death, at only 19 years of age, was certainly too soon.  I had many things that I wanted to do in life, but I did not fear death itself.  And of course I still was determined to fight tooth and nail to survive.  This line of cool thinking under the night’s pressure left me feeling very complete, whole, and integrated. 

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Then a horribly sickening thought came to me:  knowledge of the effect upon my family – my mother, father, and my 14-year-old sister – when news of my death reached them.  This horror made me so nauseated that I almost puked.  I sobbed at the thought of their anguish.  Just thinking about it now, over 40 years later, brings tears to my eyes.  I still remember that stab of helpless grief for the grief that they would feel. 

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As it happened, I obviously did survive that night – and “God” had nothing to do with it unless he shamelessly plays random favorites:  I may have lived, but six other young Marines died that night.  Kids who had families back home.  Not even mentioning the brave Vietnamese enemy who died that night, and their families. 

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The black rain was still pouring down and obscuring everything.  Then, suddenly all hell broke loose.  All at once it became evident that NVA infantry had broken through our perimeter about 75 meters to my right.  The NVA had sent sappers in quietly with wire cutters, followed by sappers who used poles and ropes to spread and separate the wire to make a hole big enough for infantry infiltration.  It was all under the cover of the rainy darkness and the loud wind, and it was impossible to see or hear the sappers at work. 

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For me, it was a sudden shock awakening from my philosophical reveries.  Now was real-time terror – right here, right now – with no time to think about trivial cosmological speculations.  It was now all senses, practiced tactics, and cunning.  The NVA had breached our perimeter and suddenly started firing on us from behind the foxholes off to my right.  The black rain obscured everything except for the tracers of AK-47 rounds.  Tracers told that night’s entire story.  NVA tracers went into the two holes on either side of their breach in the wire, and a responding fire was evidenced by M-16 tracers from the Marines there, who were taken completely by surprise.  The Marines’ tracers gave away their positions, and their fire weakened as they were quickly overwhelmed and annihilated. 

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The NVA were pouring in and fanning out within the perimeter, as their constantly increasing volume of tracers revealed.  Then we suddenly had heavy incoming automatic fire from in front, from close outside the wire, as well as from the rear, from inside, and we were pinned down by this crossfire, faces in the mud.  It was overwhelming and faster than one would believe.  I was confined in my tiny, tight crawl-hole bunker and could not even begin to get a shot off.  If I detonated the Claymores now it would only reveal our exact positions with the big flashes and not do much harm to any enemy outside the wire.  Besides, it was happening too fast.  It looked like it would be over extremely soon with a bad ending for us.  I readied my bayonet and psyched up for the apocalypse.  Then we got unexpected assistance. 

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Unbeknown to me, there was a daytime observation tower on this ridge, behind us to the right, and it was manned this night by a Platoon Sergeant whose name I never got.  Wish I could have met him because he saved numerous Marine lives that night, including yours truly.  He had an M-60 machine-gun up in his tower with an A-gunner feeding him ammo belts, and this guy never let up.  Suddenly his tracers came down on the NVA within the perimeter – which gave away his position and caused them to fire up at him.  NVA tracers all tilted up at him immediately.  It was a wild fireworks show in the dark rain.  The machine-gunner in the tower shot in a series of long sweeping bursts and never fully paused until a 100 round belt had been spent, when there was a short pause as he secured another belt and then continued firing.  The pouring, blowing rain cooled his barrel enough that it did not burn out, and he just kept pouring lead into the infiltrators.  It was masterful work. 

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The machine-gun fire from the tower thinned out the NVA on the inside of the wire and broke their momentum, and then he directed fire at the hole in the wire where tracers indicated that they were still coming through.  He hosed them down with lead.  He backed up the incoming NVA at the bottleneck hole in the wire and stopped any more from coming in.  The NVA were stumbling over their comrades’ dead bodies and dying in heaps.  (Later we found them piled four-deep in the bottleneck.)  A mopping up within the perimeter was done, and the gap was secured.  The NVA still outside our perimeter knew they would not prevail and vanished into the rain before dawn. 

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Dawn came slowly because of the heavy overcast and rain, and I was shocked that I had seen the dawn of another day.  The two Marines on my position, one to my left and one to my right, spoke, saying, “I’m coming in.  Don’t shoot me.”  We just shook our heads at the long crazy night just past.  Eventually a Marine came by to guide me and other temporary reinforcements back to our entrenchments over the hill.  We shuffled back to whatever semi-dry digs we could find, and I slept almost the entire day with adrenaline burnout. 

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Six Marines died that night, the guys on two holes over to my right.  I never met them and never even knew their names.  A number of ours were wounded, some severely.  The NVA dead numbered a couple of dozen. 

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Looking back, as unchanged an atheist now as I was then, I am still haunted sometimes by “survivor guilt”, a common feeling among combat vets, wondering why in hell I was spared while these other Marines were killed.  Should I, could I, have done something else?  Why did I survive?  Was it just luck that the NVA hit a bit to my right rather than coming over the top of me?  Haunting thoughts. 

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All in all, I put my survival down to dumb luck, mere chance – and an M-60 machine- gunner with balls of brass in a tower. 

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But don’t ever tell me that there are no atheists in foxholes. 

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-Zenwind.

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Movie Review: The Flowers of War

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The Flowers of War (2011) is a Chinese-made film starring Christian Bale and a great cast of Chinese actresses. It is in English and Chinese with subtitles. It is a great story, showing unexpected humanity.
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It is a story based upon a historical novel as well as on historical accounts, and it happens during the 1937 Japanese conquest of Nanking, China. The brutality of many of the occupying Japanese troops has forever earned the infamous label of “The Rape of Nanking.”
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I was actually surprised by the restraint shown by the filmmakers. I have read of, and have seen documentary film footage of, the hideously savage treatment of Chinese citizens under the Japanese occupation, and it is horror beyond words. While the film did not shy completely from depicting this aspect, it instead focused on the deep and humane personal changes our protagonists go through while experiencing this crucible of barbarity. I found it to be incredibly inspiring.
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Our characters meet in a Nanking Catholic church as the Japanese tighten their grip on the city. Bale’s character is a burned-out American mortician with mercenary motives. There are a dozen young teenage Chinese girls living in the church’s convent, and their priest protector is dead. Then a dozen flashy prostitutes from a nearby brothel also seek refuge at the church. Bale has more than he bargained for.
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The decisions and actions of the girls and the prostitutes drive most of the moral action. Bale is a reluctant hero carried along, yet there are heroines and heroes aplenty. I highly recommend this movie.
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-Zenwind.
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Movie Review: Enemies of the People (2009)

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Enemies of the People (2009) is a documentary about the Cambodian genocide by the communist Khmer Rouge. I recommend it highly. It is in English and Khmer with English and Thai subtitles.
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In the late 1970s the Khmer Rouge took their version of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology and tried to out-do Mao. They abolished city life, herded everyone into the jungles at gunpoint and forced them to be peasant farmers. “Enemies of the people” were thought to be everywhere, and they killed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of those they identified as middle class Cambodians, e.g., students, teachers, professionals, and even “middle peasants” who husbanded small plots of land. Money and markets were abolished, so death by starvation resulted, and it is hard to sort famine deaths from murders. Estimates vary, but around 2 million Cambodians died during the Khmer Rouge regime, perhaps 21% of the population.
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The filmmaker, Thet Samboth, one of today’s leading news journalists in Cambodia, lost his family during the killings. His father, a Khmer Rouge member, was purged during the madness, his brother was killed later, and his mother died soon after. But he said he doesn’t seek revenge. He just wanted to understand it all and to record this history as a lesson for future generations before it is forgotten. He took 10 years to make the film, slowly gaining the confidence of many former Khmer Rouge killers including one of the former top two leaders of the Khmer Rouge, Nuon Chea, former Brother Number Two (to the late Pol Pot’s Number One). Nuon Chea is now 82 and facing a criminal justice tribunal.
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Lower in the ranks of the Khmer Rouge were the actual killers out in the provinces, the people who had to slit the throats of countless “enemies of the people” on the orders of those higher up. (The orders were to “save bullets” and thus kill in a more personal face-to-face manner with knives or iron bars.) Khoun was one of them, and he points out where in his rural neighborhood the killing fields and burial grounds were, pointing in all directions around them. Neighbors passing by confirm it.
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Suon was a bit higher in rank and ordered Khoun and others to kill, as well as himself taking part in the killing of many. Today both of them are very remorseful that they blindly followed such orders. Suon, referring to traditional Theravada Buddhist beliefs, asks: How many rebirths in how many holes in hell must I endure to wash away my evil karma? He is in absolute despair.
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Sister “Em” is interviewed, an even higher ranking Khmer Rouge official at their local level. She had ordered Suon and Khoun to kill. She is reluctant to have her face filmed, so all we see is her back-lit outline. She is not as forthright as Suon and Khoun, seemingly not admitting her own guilt so much as it just being a case of
“following orders from above.” The higher we go in the Khmer Rouge hierarchy, the less we find the acceptance of responsibility. The higher we go, the more they remain True Believers in their holy struggle.
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I wished that there had been more analysis of the ideology motivating the leaders. The closest we get is when Brother Number Two Nuon Chea still insisted that it was, after all, right to value (an abstraction called) “the people” over “individuals” – somehow justifying the killing of maybe 2 million of these individuals. Rationalizing to the bitter end, he said they were “enemies of the people.” 20% of the population?!?
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Who really were the Enemies of the People? Individual Cambodians who just wanted to pursue life, liberty and happiness with their families? Or self-anointed intellectual leaders such as Pol Pot and Nuon Chea? This is classic Collectivism, where the abstract good of the collective group, e.g., variously called the “people,” “nation,” “community,” “society,” “tribe,” “race,” or “gang,” somehow justifies sacrificing the actual real-life individual members of those collective groups. As Ayn Rand and other libertarians have reminded us, a collective is nothing but an arbitrary grouping of individuals. It is the individual person that lives, feels, thinks and aspires, and who suffers and dies at the hands of the political True Believers (be those politicians self-labeled as “brothers,” “comrades,” “conservatives,” “progressives,” etc.). In Cambodia’s case, multiply that individual’s pain, suffering and death by 2 million.
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Nuon Chea seems unrepentant. Yet when filmmaker Thet Samoth finally did tell him at the end of the film that his own family was killed by the Khmer Rouge, Nuon Chea did say that he felt very sorry. Perhaps this one concrete example of the personal tragedy of an individual, Samoth, who had befriended him and talked to him for many years made some kind of connection to reality in the mind of Brother Number Two. A bit too late, I think.
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-Zenwind.
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Book Review: With the Old Breed, by E.B. Sledge

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With the Old Breed (1981/2007) is the finest combat memoir by an enlisted man that I have ever read, and this is merely a brief note on it after I finished reading it today. The “Old Breed,” of course, is the First Marine Division (1st MarDiv), first activated in WWII to fight at Guadalcanal, the first US ground offensive against the Empire of Japan. This book was one of the main primary sources used for the great HBO miniseries The Pacific (2010), which is quite true to the book.
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The 1st MarDiv went on to fight at Cape Gloucester on New Britain, Peleliu (the ferocious but “forgotten” battle), and finally on Okinawa at war’s end. E.B. Sledge joined the division in time to see action on both Peleliu and Okinawa; my father joined them in time to see action on Okinawa (see the photo on p.77 of a 75mm “pack” howitzer like one my father crewed); and I joined the Old Breed in 1969 in Da Nang to see action in Quang Nam Province, RVN.
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Sledge was a fine writer and a sensitive soul whose horrific personal experiences in the meat-grinder battles of Peleliu and Okinawa are given to us honestly, starkly and humanely. He does not glorify war. Rather, he gives the reader the actual realities: the terror, stink, brutality, inhumanity, soul-killing fatigue and madness of it. The American and Japanese casualty statistics he gives are sobering; but the experiences, sights, sounds, smells and emotions he personally relates are horrifying.
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-Zenwind.
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Nightmares of War & the Sense of Smell

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(Do not read this too close to mealtime.)
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This incident took place in northwestern Pennsylvania USA in April, May or June sometime in the mid-1990s, in the first really consistently hot days of the year. This is the time of the year when the remains of animals that had been road-killed by cars during winter and left along the roads smell most rank. My many walks along highways and back-roads have always confirmed this.
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I was living at Wilderness Park high up on the Allegheny Plateau and hiking often out on the back trails in the Allegheny National Forest, which was just out my back door. One section of my favorite trail paralleled a back-road for a brief while at a distance of several hundred yards across a quite wild forested area, but if the wind was right you could occasionally hear motor vehicles on the road across that stretch of woods.
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On this one particularly hot day as I was hiking this trail, the wind was blowing from the direction of this back-road, and I caught a couple of different whiffs of road-kill from that direction. One of the smells was extra strong, and I was sure that it must be a very big animal such as a deer or even a bear.
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Immediately after this time I started to have very vivid, extremely violent and disturbing nightmares that involved stark images and memories of the Vietnam War. They went on for a week or two. I had not had nightmares like this for a long time, so I could not account for it.
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I have had other war-related nightmares that could be easily explained, before and after this episode. Back in 1986 after seeing the very authentic movie “Platoon” in the theater, I immediately had nightmares and disturbed sleep for a two week period.
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Also, a number of years later – long after this incident at Wilderness Park that I am presently describing had occurred – I again had disturbed sleep for a period, and I am sure that this latter episode was because at that time I was teaching US Military History for two semesters. As a brand-new course preparation for me, I was reading about and thinking of war all of the time, and I was especially thinking of it last of all before sleep-time. (I gladly handed over this course to a teacher both well-qualified and very eager to teach it, because it pleased him very much and contributed to his morale as a history teacher on our team, it strengthened our history department’s program, and it got the nightmares out of my head.) But these two episodes, the one before and the one after the Wilderness Park one, were not as disturbing as the one I now describe in the mid-1990s.
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I could not explain why I was having these vivid nightmares at this particular time, so I just assumed it was the hot humid weather triggering memories of tropical Vietnam. I turned up the a/c at night but still had the horrific nightmares.
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Then I belatedly got the community gossip. It was not road-kill that I had smelled after all. Two neighborhood boys on their bicycles had discovered a woman dead in her car on an obscure turn-off dead-end lane off from that back-road that paralleled my hiking trail. She had committed suicide in her car with the windows down earlier on one of those fine days of spring, and she was not discovered until a while after the fact, and this along with the extreme hot weather put her into a bad state of decomposition. The location of her body was exactly upwind of the place on my hiking trail where I had smelled on that day what I thought was a big animal road-kill, and the timeframe was an exact match – i.e., I had smelled the scent before her discovery. It had never occurred to my conscious mind that it was not the smell of a regular road-kill of a forest animal.
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Dead mammals have a particular smell, but dead humans have a unique one. The best descriptions will usually tell you that a human’s decomposition smell is a sickeningly “sweet” smell. The only time I smelled this smell intensely was in Vietnam. In the tropical heat, decomposition worked fast. Our own dead were zipped into body bags and brought out as quickly as possible, but sometimes not quick enough. Enemy dead were often neglected, especially in more remote areas, and you were reminded of them by the smell whenever you went back through that area. It was a smell that you wished at the time that you could somehow flush and cleanse out of your nostrils, sinuses and skull, but it stayed with you. By the 1990s I had completely forgotten about all of this through the years, especially the fact of the uniqueness of the smell of human decomposition.
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So now I became convinced that, 25 years after being in Vietnam, the ripe death-smell of this unfortunate woman near Wilderness Park triggered memories of the war somewhere inside my subconscious and completely without my conscious knowledge, thus producing unexplained nightmares. It made me a believer that memories can reside in the mind closely linked to the sense of smell.
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I began writing this document when I read (on 18 September 2008) the following article in Science Daily online. The linked article is named, “Emotion and Scent Create Lasting Memories – Even in a Sleeping Brain,” and describes experiments on the brain chemistry of mice at the Duke University Medical Center and is published in The Journal of Neuroscience. Implications for other mammals such as humans are clear.
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It all falls into place and makes perfect sense to me.
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[Addendum (12 Dec. 2013): Here is a link to news of a new study, reported in Science Daily online, Sniffing Out Danger:  Fearful Memories Can Trigger Heightened Sense of Smell.  The original journal article was published in Science and titled, “Fear Learning Enhances Neural Responses to Threat-Predictive Sensory Stimuli.”] 

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-Zenwind.
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Movie Review: The US Marine Corps, Avatar (2009), Aliens (1986), and James Cameron

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[This is posted on the Marine Corps Birthday 2010.]
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I was starting to wonder: what is it with James Cameron and his ongoing respect for the US Marine Corps? He is native Canadian with no military experience, but he has written rather good portrayals of Marines in at least two of his great films. Then I find out that Cameron’s younger brother, David, was in the Corps, and James has the highest respect for Leathernecks (aka, Gyrenes, Jarheads).
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Cameron was screenwriter/director for Aliens (1986), the second and perhaps best film in that series, and which had Colonial Marines of the future. Al Matthews, the actor that played the Colonial Marine sergeant in this film, was actually a Marine Vietnam War vet. So his dialogue to his Marines after they all come out of cryo-sleep came naturally, namely when he said:
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“All right, sweethearts, what are you waiting for? Breakfast in bed? … Another glorious day in the Corps! A day in the Marine Corps is like a day on the farm! Every meal’s a banquet! Every paycheck a fortune! Every formation a parade! I LOVE the Corps!”
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Maybe it is Cameron’s temperament that also makes him feel akin to the Marines – Cameron is an infamous hard-ass on set who demands that things are done with complete perfection. I was particularly impressed with his treatment of Marines in the science fiction film Avatar (2009) in which he was the writer/director.
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The protagonist of Avatar, Jake Sully, is a disabled veteran Recon Marine whose combat injuries confine him permanently to a wheelchair. He has a chance to join the Avatar Program on the planet Pandora only because an avatar driver’s body (a hybrid of a human mind inside a Pandoran-native humanoid Na’vi body) had been prepared from the DNA of his twin brother. His twin was a Program scientist who just died, and his avatar body had been prepared at great cost, so Jake’s genetic identity with his brother makes him uniquely able to use it. And in an avatar body Jake will be able to walk again. So he is a misplaced warrior thrown into a science program, and yet the wild and dangerous world of Pandora might demand such a warrior spirit.
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When in his human body in the wheelchair, Jake always wears a T-shirt with the USMC’s Eagle, Globe and Anchor emblem. He’s proud. In an early voice-over narrative monologue that defines who he is, he says: “There’s no such thing as an ex-Marine; you may be out, but you never lose the attitude.” Ooh rah!
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When Jake, in his avatar Na’vi body, is brought before the Na’vi tribal leaders, they ask him what he was before as a human, if he was not a scientist. He replies with pride, “I was a Marine,” and then, to further explain this concept to them, he continues, “a … uh … a warrior … of the Jarhead clan.” That was the moment I became a really big fan of James Cameron’s writing.
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The villain, Col. Quaritch, is Security Director of the Pandora mining operation, heading what is really a mercenary force of tough guys. He is also a veteran Recon Marine, and he is tougher than nails. His dialogue and delivery are priceless. (He is played perfectly by Stephen Lang, who played Stonewall Jackson in Gods and Generals, I thought Lang should have gotten an award for movie “villain of the year” for his performance in Avatar.)
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Here in the real world of movie critics there has been some misplaced controversy about Cameron’s treatment of the USMC in Avatar, with many people thinking that he is making the Corps look bad through the former-Marine villains such as Col. Quaritch and many of his mercenary thugs. This argument goes thus: the actual USMC strategic doctrine for over a century has been to win over the “hearts and minds” of the indigenous people. To truly win them over. This strategic vision came from the Marine experience of always being a small force landed in hostile places a long way from home, and it evolved into the Small Wars Manual, the bible of counter-insurgency operations. (The Small Wars Manual has consistently been ignored by the Pentagon until it is too late.)
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Critics of Cameron say that the official policy of villain Col. Quaritch – which is a hostile contempt for the indigenous Na’vi of Pandora – disrespects this USMC vision. But the critics completely miss the point. Hero Jake Sully fully redeems the story in two ways: First, he serves the just cause within this story’s context. Second, he actually is devoted to a Marine-like vision of understanding and working with the indigenous Na’vi. And as a Marine, Jake is solidly brave, wonderfully true, and always faithful.
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Semper Fi. Enough said right there.
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-Zenwind.
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Book Review: Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War (2010) by Karl Marlantes

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This is a great Vietnam War tale – and although it is a work of fiction it is still authentic in spirit and in its every detail. Matterhorn is the name of a fictitious hill within the story in the Khe Sanh area of I Corps, South Vietnam. This is the best novel that I have ever read to come out of the Vietnam experience and one of the best war novels I’ve ever read. I highly recommend it.
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The author, Karl Marlantes, has been there. He was a highly decorated Marine platoon commander in Vietnam, earning the Navy Cross (the only higher award for Navy and Marine Corps personnel being the Medal of Honor), the Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts, ten Air Medals and two Navy Commendation Medals for valor. Keeping in mind the notorious stinginess of the Marine Corps in awarding medals of any kind, his achievements are noteworthy. Marlantes is also a Yale graduate and a Rhodes scholar. He spent over 30 years working on this, his debut novel.
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The novel gives you the experience of the Vietnam War, the insane horrors of combat, the constant filth, both the extremes of the tropical heat to the shivering cold nights when soaking wet and bone-weary. Race relation problems of the late 1960s are handled very well, and also the phenomena of “fragging” an incompetent officer or NCO. For Marines planning to stay in the Corps, there was a distinction between the more professional “career men” versus the “lifers.” A lifer was defined as “someone who can’t make it on the outside,” someone with enough rank to make your life miserable for no good reason, and these guys were sometimes targets of fraggings. The dialogues and the profanities are exactly right.
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The stupid politics of that war is everywhere a major theme, as lives are wasted taking hard-won territory only to abandon it soon after. On occasion an officer would think more about their own career advancements than the losses or hardships of their men. Those being killed and maimed are usually teenagers who haven’t even lived their lives yet. The book sometimes makes you very angry, but it is ultimately redeeming.
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The protagonist, 2nd Lt. Mellas, evolves from a spoiled college kid with military-political ambitions to a good combat officer and a compassionate commander of men. He learns from both the enlisted and commissioned Marines who have been in-country before him. The other characters are very well drawn and very authentic, especially Lt. Hawke, the kind of guy that men will follow anywhere. The humor in the midst of horror also comes through at times.
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There were many details in the story that really brought back vivid memories. For example, the concussion from the explosion of in-coming enemy mortar rounds sending a wave of pressure against your eyeballs as well as your eardrums. Also well-written are the times when you think that you will certainly die soon – e.g., Cortell and Jermain discuss Pascal’s Wager, although they have never heard of Pascal or his philosophical “wager” about what awaits us after death. We all knew about that bet in some way of our own and were forced to think about it. That is haunting.
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Before reading the novel, definitely read the “Glossary of Weapons, Technical Terms, Slang and Jargon” in back, and keep a bookmarker in place there so that you can refer back to it while reading. The Vietnam War had its own unique jargon, but so did the Navy and Marine Corps, and so a lot of it is esoteric to those services. But even I had to look over this Glossary many times for things such as radio call-sign protocol details, etc.
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Also, keep handy the three pages in front of the novel for the fictitious “Chain of Command and Principal Characters” chart (with their radio call-signs in italics), and also the two map pages: “Bravo Company’s Area of Operation” and “Matterhorn and Helicopter Hill.” The USMC units in this novel are fictitious, in that they are real Marine (reserve) units but they were never in Vietnam. Also, the map adds the fictitious Vietnam hills Matterhorn, Helicopter Hill, Eiger and Sky Cap, and this map goes farther west toward the Laotian border than it did in reality beyond Khe Sanh. Read the author’s disclaimer on the copyright page for the full details about his fiction versus the reality.
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I think this novel is going to be a war classic.
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