How to survive a war movie...

[Rico (FGM)]

riend sent this over -- a little dated, but still relevant...

How to survive a war movie


Don't be a lieutenant. Don't carry a picture of your girlfriend. And don't,
whatever you do, read a book. By Justine Elias
Justine Elias
Guardian
Friday February 22, 2002
Listen up, soldiers! With two stories of modern war, Black Hawk Down and
Behind Enemy Lines, already playing in British cinemas, and with the second
world war drama Hart's War and the Vietnam epic We Were Soldiers out next
month, it's time you got a lesson in combat movie survival. I want you
grunts to get through the current crop of war movies and come out the other
side covered in blood, guts, and cinematic cliche.
1. Change your name to Butch Wolf
In the combat movie, the guys who survive are grunts named Stone, Steele,
and Black. If your name isn't synonymous with hardness, it ought to sound
like something stiff, durable or fierce: Maverick, Wolf, Arrowsmith,
Hawkins. Get the idea? If you've got a first name, it had better be Jack,
Steve, Mike, Matt, Scott, or Butch. Otherwise you're dead. Whimsical
nicknames (Wrong-Way, Puffy) are permissible only in fighter pilots, and
only then if someone else in the squadron has a nickname (Goofy, Daffy,
Pluto) sillier than yours, indicating his imminent demise.
2. Get busted down to private
If you want a chance at survival, be an enlisted man. Don't be a lieutenant.
Lieutenants are dainty college boys like Tommy Hart (Colin Farrell in Hart's
War), a doe-eyed, smooth-faced Yale law student. Lieutenants are pussies
forever being shown up by exasperated, seen-it-all sergeants. If you must be
an officer, be a foul-mouthed, combat-hardened lieutenant colonel like Hal
Moore (the real colonel played by Mel Gibson in We Were Soldiers),
Apocalypse Now's Kilgore (Robert Duvall) or Black Hawk Down's Danny McKnight
(another real person, played in the film by Tom Sizemore). Note the
percussive consonants in Lt Col Danny McKnight; if you can't hear the brass
balls clanging together, you're deaf.
3. Ditch your girlfriend
Do not, under any circumstances, carry a photograph of your wife or
girlfriend. Enemy snipers can home in on such photos from several miles
away. Merely breathing the name of a female acquaintance could mark you for
sudden death. If your girlfriend, Lucy Jean, is pregnant, but you promise
you're sure gonna marry her when you get back to Iowa or Ohio, forget it.
You're going home in a box.
If a lovesick grunt shows off a wallet photo to the entire platoon, back
away slowly. Let the other men whistle or make rude remarks. (If you're in a
second world war movie, a slovenly corporal will, at the mere mention of a
woman, exclaim, "Come to Papa!" Stay far away from him, too. He'll be
stepping on a mine in the next reel, never having had a taste of "French
mam-zelles".)
Boost your chances for survival (as Charlie Sheen does in Platoon) by
pretending to admire Lucy Jean's bovine features. Tell the whole catcalling,
offensively gesturing platoon that Lucy Jean is "real pretty", and that "You
guys should just lay off the new guy because he's doing the right thing".
Enemy snipers will sympathise with your awkward social predicament and
turn their sights back to the proper target: Lucy Jean's simpering
boyfriend.
4. Don't be the New Guy
If you are the newest recruit, and you are not narrating the film, you will
die. You will be referred to only as the New Guy. As Sheen said in Platoon,
"Nobody cares about the New Guy." There's a second world war movie that says
it better: They Were Expendable. If you are the radio man, you are going to
die. Your dramatic function is to get shot in the heat of battle so that the
hero can grab the radio before saving everyone's asses. The Radio Man, too,
dies unmourned.
If you're in a period film, and your entire job in the military is carrying
the company colours, you will die. The hero will seize the flag, rally the
disheartened troops, and lead them to victory. You want a safe,
behind-the-scenes job? Volunteer to be the soldier who paints "Welcome to
Hell" (in English, of course) in a war-torn foreign city. It wouldn't be a
contemporary war movie without that helpful, obvious war-is-hell graffiti.
Perhaps this sarcastic grunt is the son or grandson of the guy who was
assigned to stencil those little signs that read, "Dunkirk, 75 miles,
Honululu, 2,500 miles". He's a survivor.
5. Make friends with the CO
He is tough but fair, quirky yet by the book. He will have an extremely
gravelly voice. He will be played by Bruce Willis (Hart's War), Mel Gibson
(We Were Soldiers), Gene Hackman (Behind Enemy Lines), Sam Shepard (Black
Hawk Down), Nick Nolte (The Thin Red Line), Harvey Keitel (U-571), Alec
Baldwin (Pearl Harbor), Robert De Niro (Men of Honor), or Tommy Lee Jones
(Rules of Engagement). He will be 20 years older than a real military man of
his rank. He will love you, but not in a homosexual way. More in a
you're-the-boy-he-once-was kind of way.
6. Throw away that book
Don't do anything too artistic or refined in your free time. Sketching,
cooking, taking pretty snapshots for the folks back home - do I need to
explain what will happen once word of this gets out? In Black Hawk Down, we
meet a Delta Force guy who's a budding author/illustrator of children's
books. It's not a good sign that his magnum opus is dedicated to his small
daughter and that the one finished sketch we see looks as though he's
creating A Little Girl's Guide to the Spanish Inquisition.
Merely reading a book while others nervously assemble their kit is enough to
send you to the casualty ward. Ioan Gruffudd, in Black Hawk Down, suffers an
epileptic seizure immediately after handling the US Army guidebook to Somali
culture. If you must read, do so in a second world war movie. Choose
challenging material in a foreign language, and wear little, round
spectacles for protection.
That way you're likely to be kept alive until quite late in the film, if
only to provide helpful exposition for the hero. Then someone will taunt
you, saying: "Hey, Professor, whatchya readin'? Hegel? Who's he - a Kraut?"
"Whoa, look! This whole book's written in Kraut-talk! The professor here
speaks German! That's sure gonna come in handy if we meet up with a German
patrol!"
7. Don't send soppy letters home
You've got to tell the folks back home that you're still alive, but don't be
too effusive. If all you can say is "I love you" and "I miss you", you'll be
marked as a sentimental character with no intrinsic value to the plot, and
be killed off. Better to play to the audience, providing necessary
descriptive and background detail. In A Walk in the Sun (1945), John
Ireland's Private Craven incessantly composes unwritten letters to his
sister, and later to the mother of a dead soldier. These give the audience
an indication of what he's seeing. So it would be crazy to kill him off as
we would lose track of where his platoon is in the bleak, black and white
landscape.
Writing to a female relation seems to be an essential rite of passage in
your combat movie character's development. Platoon is framed by Sheen's
voiceover narration, which indicates that he is telling the entire story,
atrocities and all, in a letter to his grandmother. That's one hip
grandmother. Or a very shocked one.
8. Examine your relationship with your father
No, he isn't here with you, but sons fight the wars their fathers'
generation started. So how do you feel about your father? And how do you
feel about your father's military service record? Think carefully before
answering. If you have normal issues with an absent or emotionally distant
father, you'll be okay. Lt Tommy Hart sounds a bit in awe of his
statesman/war hero father - but there's wistfulness in his voice, not anger,
when he reveals that his father got him a soft assignment, far from the
front, as a general's aide. If your father was accused of cowardice, though,
and you only want to see his name cleared, you are golden in terms of movie
survival, my little Top Gun. You shall live. You must live! The modern
combat movie is all about you.
9. Carry a Bible. But don't read it
Atheists, foxholes, no room, etc. Christians take up most of the spiritual
space in this genre. Jews as combatants exist mainly as put-upon loners in
second world war epics, like Montgomery Clift in The Young Lions; Hindus and
Muslims, though more numerous in the real world, will have to consult combat
films made in languages other than English.
However, a little bit of Christianity goes a long way. Excessive
scripture-quoting will set you up either for mockery (Black Hawk Down) or
for a risky job as an Allied sniper (Barry Pepper's in Saving Private Ryan).
And you don't want to end up as an unhinged evangelist who marches toward
gruesome self-sacrifice while reciting the 23rd Psalm. Safety tip: a small
Bible in the chest pocket will protect the wearer from all ordnance up to a
rocket-propelled grenade.
10. Become an idealist
There are no politics in wartime, there's just us and them. If you are the
one guy in the movie who bothers to admire the landscape as you fly over it
(as Josh Hartnett does in Black Hawk Down, and Charlie Sheen did in
Platoon), flatten it in your tank, or cruise through it in a Humvee, you
should marvel (bonus points if you do this in voiceover) that "there really
seemed to be no difference between us and them". A character who is willing
to change - to learn - is one who usually survives.
So if you, like Black Hawk Down's (real) helicopter pilot and Behind Enemy
Lines' (fictional) fighter pilot, get cracked on the head with a rifle butt,
yet you still believe that you can make the enemy militiaman, who is
screaming at you in his native tongue, understand that you and your heavily
armed comrades are in his country to do good, then you are the bravest and
rarest of human beings, but the commonest of movie heroes: the true
idealist.
If you're the guy whose superior officers berate you because you "just don't
get it", then that means that you (like the audience) truly do understand.
You're getting out of this movie alive.

[Vulture]

Awesome :)

Vulture (FGM)