A bit of preambluation:
This blog used to be about how sad and lonely I was. Now, it’s about pairing things together…the happy accidents of kismet that occur in life…or whatever.
I played Spec Ops: The Line (2010) on a borrowed Xbox 360 (such is quarantine) right around the same time I watched Errol Morris’ 2008 documentary Standard Operating Procedure. The former is a 3rd-person shooter about a rescue mission gone awry after a cataclysmic sandstorm buries Dubai. The latter is a movie examining the abuses at Abu Ghraib by the 372nd. But both happen to be about what you’ll do to go along and get along, and what you’ll do when you think you have no choice.
Spec Ops’ unique setting got it banned from the UAE, but they don’t know what they’re missing. Flying by helicopter, even on a last-gen console, into a 21st century ghost metropolis is an incredible way to start a game. You play Walker, in charge of a 3-man detail tasked with finding survivors and radioing HQ for evac. But Dubai isn’t as abandoned as you would initially believe. The civilians believe your squad to be part of the 33rd Infantry, a battalion that went rogue under the command of Walker’s previous commander, Colonel John Konrad. On the other hand, the 33rd Infantry think you’re with the CIA, who armed the locals against them.
You commit an escalating litany of war crimes. You have to! Everyone’s out to get you! Sometimes the only way to get to your objective is by dropping white phosphorous on a blockade of US Troops, who unbeknownst to you, are holding civilians in a big open-air pen. Don’t worry, you get to walk through the wreckage afterwards and survey what you’ve done in agonizing cut-scene detail.
And if that doesn’t sound like fun, well, you also have Jake Busey howling in your ear as a gone-native Hunter S Thompson character and Bruce Boxleitner as Konrad, lecturing you about how we all have choices to make, Captain.
Unsurprisingly, the compounding atrocities begin to take a toll on you, and you begin to experience PTSD. Hearing voices, seeing things, vision blurring and blacking out. It’s fun!
Without giving anything about a 10-year-old game you won’t play away, the general lesson here is that the entire time you were “doing your duty” i.e. playing a shooting game as intended, and it costs your humanity.
Standard Operating Procedure interrogates the military police responsible for the famous atrocity photographs from 2003. Or at least those who consented to be interviewed on film. But do you remember the lady thumbs up lady? Or the smiling lady leaning over the naked human pyramid? He got them. He didn’t get anybody doing time in military prison for it, obviously. Nor did he get any of the victims, the subjects of the photographs. Fortunately they have been interviewed elsewhere.
And if I can talk about myself for a moment, the biggest thing that was impressed upon me at military school was that a real man takes accountability for what they have done. But these whiners do anything but. It was everyone else’s idea. I was just there. I was following orders. They were killing my buddies out there! These are all excuses you hear the sundry war criminals give.
Morris doesn’t speak as much as he does in other movies, e.g. The Fog of War, rightly realizing that the interviewees, given enough celluloid rope, would hang themselves. The passive voice is abused. Stories change. Justifications are made. “Hey I put a leash on a naked man, but I didn’t drag him.”
Morris isn’t interested in the guilt or innocence of the detainees or the legal disposition of the interviewees. His primary focus is the photographs, terabytes of them. It’s a Morris-esque meta-interrogation. The implicit question is how could you do this? But on another level, how could you pose for it?
The refrain of the movie is “I don’t know.” Insert hoary drinking game cliché here. But on another level, the answer is in the title. It’s Standard Operating Procedure. The events of Abu Ghraib are endemic of how recruits are conditioned.
The primary objective of Army training is to tamp down agency. Orders are given, and you follow them. But as any idiot that paid attention to half a rhetoric class session knows any order is open to interpretation. The most generous read of Standard Operating Procedure is that the folks interpreting the orders were scared, homesick, without support systems to try to make them think critically about what they were doing.
The path of least resistance happened to be the path of the utmost cruelty, as so often happens.
And as Spec Ops will show you, there is a thrill to cutting through the Gordian knot of warfare. Descending a spiral staircase, gunning down American troops as The Black Angels drones on the soundtrack is indeed a bit of a thrill.
Don’t think too hard about it. It’s just a game.
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