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Hollywood and Those "Special" Guys (and Gals)

© John Lovett

There is a tendency of Hollywood writers, directors, and producers, et. al. to make movies that portray every soldier, sailor, airmen, and marine as a member of some super-elite, super-secret, highly-trained, "special" unit. We get the plethora of movies of where the star was an ex-SEAL (uhh, ahh), an ex-Special Forces (ohh rah), or an ex-whatever. Even Sylvester Stallone in the FIRST BLOOD series of movies was supposed to be an ex-Ranger type. That was how he knew how to survive in the wild, you see. If he had been just an ordinary grunt, then he could not have known how to do all those neat tricks.

The lure of the special service. What causes this tendency in Hollywood to portray the prior service military type as an ex-special whatever? I don't know. I guess it all just sounds mysterious. People like Robert Marcinko has gotten a lot of mileage out of being an ex-SEAL. On that largesse alone, he has published several books with the same theme; ex-SEAL tells you how it is. To tell the truth, I spent several years working with Special Forces. It was exciting all right. I got to sleep on the cold ground, ate next to nothing, and walked so much I had thought that I had seen all there is to see of Fort Bragg. It seems for the basic Hollywood story that being just an ordinary soldier is not good enough. To be a "real" character in a movie, you have to had been an ex-whatever.

It also seems to me that every special ex-whatever is always portrayed as a steely-eyed killer. I've known many Special Forces troops. They might have been wild and crazy guys out of the field, but they were not killers. They had families. They had a conscience. They realized the consequences of their actions. They were professional military soldiers. They were not mercenaries. Nor did they act as mercenaries.

Personally, I like to see movies about the ordinary soldier. There were certain aspects I did not like about THE THIN RED LINE, but I liked the idea that it was a story of the ordinary soldier. I can identify with the guy struggling every day. I do not like movies where the hero of the story is some ex-whatever with supernatural intuitive powers and can overcome all obstacles with a single bound.

It's something like this: the British used to use "special forces" called Forlorn Hopes. These Forlorn Hopes were the first to go over the trench to storm the enemy's position. They knew that they were most likely going to die to the man. Nevertheless, they did their job anyway. That, to me, is heroic. We all know that by the end of the movie, Stallone and his ilk will have survived all that the bad guys had to throw at him. Movies that allow us to recognize the actions of an individual soldier within the group, cheer him on, and correspondingly recognize his demise, are more realistic and ultimately more satisfying as stories.

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