Once in a while there emerges from the Hollywood production line of drivel a film noteworthy and deserving special attention. The currently playing “Fury” is a story of an American tank crew spearheading through Germany late in WWII.
Every American should see this movie, especially the academic boobs in the White House who never served in the military but now make decisions like waging a half-way, sort-of-semi-war against ISIS and sending our troops to fight Ebola in Africa, two misguided uses of our armed forces.
Unlike so many others, this film seems realistic in depicting the chaos and urgency under enemy fire, though the pounding impact of live rounds on armor in the film is much louder than the “whack” of rounds passing through the thin skin of helicopters we flew in Southeast Asia long ago. Both will make a man’s butt-cheeks take a bite out of his seat, and the depth of the bite is what we called the “Pucker Factor.”
There are several reasons “Fury” is worth seeing. It is not an uplifting film, and it is devoid of the glory that only Hollywood can inject into a war story. It does, however, convey to the audience the ugly brutality of war, the unfair and unforgiving nasty business of killing that leaves permanent scars on cities, landscapes and souls, and how it inflicts on our own troops monotony, fatigue, stupidity, terror, filth, hunger, brushes with death and utter despair.
Every American should watch closely and absorb to remember what we send our troops to endure when we commit them to hostilities.
The more perceptive movie-goer might notice examples in this film of the vast number of places for enemy concealment and the utter folly of depending solely on air power, as the White House is doing in attacks on ISIS. The American Infantry has long held the title “Queen of Battle” because no matter how much bombing and pounding from the air and artillery, taking and holding ground to defeat an enemy is the dirty, miserable job of boots on the ground, even in our modern world.
Personally, I despise war and I would argue our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could have been avoided. Nevertheless, ISIS is now a threat to the civilized world and begs to be squashed like a bug. Only a neophyte president mixing politics with military strategy would publicly take ground troops off the table even while approving air strikes. But I would guess most who see “Fury” won’t be thinking this deep.
I wish the idealists who advocate removing barriers to women in ground combat would see this movie and pay attention to the hell-on-earth when opposing armed forces meet to tear each other to pieces.
It is true that men have been killing each other in gruesome ways since we were cavemen, but why bring women into that darkest side of human behavior? How naive must one be to support the few women viewing ground combat as their key to career advancement even while most women in the military consider those overtures to be a mistake? Is there nothing left, not even ground combat, to separate the sexes?
“Fury” illustrates the imperative for each member of a tank crew to do their job quickly in combat, instinctively and reliably lest they all be killed when they could have survived. Do you think introducing mixed sexes in that tank crew might lead to infatuation or romance and a changed dynamic among them, and doesn’t the same concern apply to openly gay men? If a female crew member were captured by the enemy, do you think the crew would react differently than how they had been trained?
The political generals and admirals in the Pentagon have been obediently pushing down the chain of command the mindset of accommodating women in combat functions even if lowering physical standards is required, which makes me wonder who in that ivory tower is calculating the cost in men’s lives when the shooting starts and the participants aren’t physically quite as strong any more.
The U.S. Marines apparently has the only remaining commandant with stones enough to stand up against any compromise of standards to accommodate women in physically demanding roles. So you would expect the media cheerleading that erupted when three female Marine officers recently passed the Combat Endurance Test (CET), an entrance screening test for the very tough Marine Corps Infantry Officer Course (IOC).
In all, 27 female Marine officers have taken the CET with 23 of them failing on the first day. These three who passed the CET came after one other had passed it only to be eliminated from the IOC. Now three more female Marine lieutenants had earned entry to the IOC with hopes of graduation.
Keep in mind the IOC trains Marine officers to lead Marine infantry in combat, and every Marine is already toughened. That means officers must be very strong, physically and mentally, setting the standard for their men to meet in a combat setting. And so they know if they “fall out” during more than one IOC tactical movement in the 13-week school, they will be expelled from the course.
The one woman former IOC student had been eliminated, but it is worth noting roughly one quarter of the men students wash out of every class because the course is designed to train only the best and strongest to be infantry officers.
The first of many IOC marches is about 7.5 miles, covered in two hours and 40 minutes carrying just over 100 pounds. Any student falling 75 or more yards behind is reminded he (or she) can’t lead the men from behind and encouraged to catch up quickly. If they don’t, they are put in a truck with one strike against them and the next strike will eliminate them.
In October during a nine-mile march with a three-hour limit carrying 124-pound packs, three men and all of the three women with one strike already fell behind and were expelled. This time the media noise was more like crickets chirping because the news didn’t fit the popular narrative of women breaking the barrier to ground combat.
And so the pressure is mounting on the Marine Corps to lower standards. I hope they keep their high standards even while a few women officers and activist groups complain this and that part of the course is unfair.
If you are female and angry with me by this point, let me assure you this isn’t any criticism of women. To illustrate my attitude, in a prior life in bank fraud investigation, I learned over time my better investigators tended to be women, because they were more detail-oriented.
Even before that I was an Army helicopter pilot, and I have likened learning to fly a helicopter to rubbing your tummy and patting the top of your head while jumping up and down on one foot while reciting your ABCs backwards. It can be done but it takes time and supreme effort and many fail. Our flight school washout rate was around 50 percent.
Having said that, if I had to bet on aptitude I would bet on women learning the delicate touch and deftness of coordination to fly a sling-blade even more quickly. Whether they could make a helicopter do the extraordinary things my brothers did under enemy fire, well, out of respect for those men I would have to say maybe so but I’d have to see it with my own eyes.
While women are capable of being excellent pilots, even combat pilots, if I were king I would keep even women pilots out of combat for one simple reason. The driving force should not be opportunity for women. It should be the national purpose, and I would have to consider the media frenzy that will explode when one of our female combat pilots is shot down and captured, with film from bug hives like ISIS captivating the world’s attention.
Will the U.S. public, politicians, the Pentagon and the White House react differently to an American woman POW on daily display, perhaps for a scheduled rape or beheading, and make policy concessions? Call me a dinosaur if you like, but my answer is yes, of course the reaction will be different.
As you watch “Fury,” think about your wife, daughter or sister being part of that ruthless mess and ask yourself what is more important, the rights of women soldiers to be in combat, or the wisdom of a country keeping women from it while men fight furiously to get it done and won.
Consider the words of Gen. George Patton in WWII when he spoke to his 3rd Army the day before D-Day in 1944, summing up the warrior attitude of overwhelming force: “… We’re not just going to shoot the bastards, we’re going to rip out their living #$@!* guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks!“
It isn’t pretty; war never is, no matter how dressed up it becomes before you see the sanitized version on TV news, no matter how much a naive White House wants to fight a constrained war designed not to defeat the enemy but to win world approval.
“Fury” should make you reflect on the vicious realities of combat compared to the dimwits now in control in Washington, D.C., whose major concern about hostilities centers on avoiding bad press, and whose most recent brilliant idea is deploying our troops to West Africa to build medical infrastructure where they have been incapable of building their own. Maybe at the end of the film you will, like me, think, “God help us.”
[Terry Garlock of Peachtree City occasionally contributes a column to The Citizen. His email is terry@garlock1.com.]
