Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Tony Villani’s documentary, Soldiers: Six Stories, Six Wars is the diversity of stories he draws on. For one thing, the title at first appears to be a misnomer. Not all of those Villani has interviewed are soldiers and, depending on how you count, the documentary either discusses five wars, or many more than six. But what really brings these stories together is the fact that they each focus on one individual’s experience in what they all agree is a permanent aspect of human civilization: the hell of war.
The stories span the Second World War, to Vietnam, Kosovo, Iraq and beyond. Although Villani does a good job of staying away from the political aspects of these wars, politics inevitably creeps in. Harry, in the first segment, tells us confidently that the Second World War was a just war that freed Europe from dictatorships. Pete and Brett, on the other hand, have different views on the Vietnam war. Pete thinks that he had a duty as an American to fight for his country, even he is ultimately ambivalent about the rightness of the war. While Brett from the outset thought the war was immoral. In listening to these stories, one can’t help but wonder just how important the notion of justice is to the soldiers fighting the war.
But one may be able to set aside the problem is justice in war if one sees it as simply a job. And this attitude, that fighting in war is a professional activity like any other, comes to dominate the documentary towards the end. We meet Melanie, who is a career soldier and has been tied to the military one way or another her whole life. She served in various parts of the world, including Kosovo and Iraq, but her story mainly revolves around the difficulties of being a woman in an overwhelmingly male environment. The last interviewee, Terry, is a military photographer who served in an elite unit in Afghanistan and other places. For him, being a solider requires cold objectivity. A professional soldier cannot afford to get emotional when a fellow solider is killed in action. This makes perfect sense; becoming emotional would endanger the lives of others. But at the same time, Terry’s attitude towards professionalism seems somehow different than that of Harry. Harry speaks about being mobilized at 19 years old, doing a terrible job and then leaving the army. It was an awful job, but he served his country and then went on to the rest of his life. For Melanie and Terry, though, the expectation is that the military is a career where one will spend most of one’s working life, regardless of whether there are major wars or not.
There have always been, of course, professional soldiers who spend their careers in the military. But in the US, the rise of an all volunteer army seems to have greatly increased the number of people who expect to be involved in conflict their entire working lives. In light of this development, the concern about justice, which seems to matter a great deal to Harry, appears to fall by the wayside.
Another dimension of this issue is that when Harry left the army for civilian life after World War Two, he was being demobilized alongside huge numbers of others. When Terry sought a life outside the military after being a professional army photographer, he found he really had no place in the world. He didn’t fit in with artistic people and his age and experience made it hard for him to become a student. Life in the military for Terry had seemingly estranged him from the wider society. He also found that the Department of Veteran’s Affairs was not really set up very well to handle the inevitable psychological scars of war.
Overall, one gets the impression that there are certain commonalities to all these conflicts: the importance of camaraderie and honor, the long-lasting psychological trauma and the terror of being so close to death for so long. These are things which have always accompanied warfare. What seems different is growing expectation that war is not really about justice, but about furthering the country’s aims, whatever they may be. There is an arc in the film from Harry’s acceptance that his war was just, to the ambivalence about Vietnam to what seems to be an unquestioning acceptance of the soldier’s role even when a war, such as Iraq in Melanie’s view, that doesn’t seem to make much sense. Over the course of the film, the soldier’s role seems to go from performing one’s duty to doing one’s job to pursuing one’s career.
© 2021. UniversalCinema Mag.