Mennonite Weekly Review

Every realistic war movie can be viewed as an antiwar movie, though not necessarily because the filmmakers intend it to be. The Hurt Locker, best picture winner at the Academy Awards on March 7, betrays no agenda.

The story of a bomb-defusing unit in Iraq, it portrays men who know they might die — or have to kill — at any moment, and how that stress affects them.

With a central character both heroic and reckless, The Hurt Locker reveals how the risk of death consumes a soldier’s mind. The film pulls the viewer close to war’s psychic toll — a reality often forgotten in America today as nearly a decade of distant combat blends into white noise.

The Hurt Locker departs from its lean storytelling only once, in an opening quote by war correspondent Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”

It certainly is for Sgt. William James, brilliant defuser of bombs and addict to the adrenaline rush of looking death in the eye. He’s courageous, risking his life for a suicide bomb­er who at the last minute regrets getting wired to blow himself up. But James also takes rash chances with his own life and those of his friends. Once he sheds his protective gear before defusing a car bomb, declaring that if he’s going to die, he’ll go comfortably.

James is a victim of war, but not in the traditional, shell-shocked sense. His peculiar disorder is loving war — or at least his own tightly focused, white-knuckle corner of it. The high-wire act of defusing a bomb crackles with exhilaration. By contrast, life at home leaves him as empty as the grocery cart he pushes past an array of meaningless choices in the breakfast cereal aisle.

Exposing war’s toll on the mind and soul, The Hurt Locker might make viewers think about resisting the drug. Conventional wisdom holds that going to war is a normal part of life in a time of crisis, and that refusing to fight is unnatural and wrong. But war steals James’ taste for normal life. It destroys his natural in­stincts. He would rather troll for bombs on the streets of Baghdad than make supper with his wife or play with his child back home.

So the question becomes: Which is natural, to ingest the drug of war or to resist? Soldiers tell of combat destroying their ability to cope with life. In a New York Times online article, Shannon P. Meehan, a tank platoon leader in Iraq, writes that his responsibility for civilian deaths filled him with self-loathing and “killed any regard I had for my own life.” Recent reports describe an epidemic of suicide among soldiers and veterans. There were 160 active-duty Army suicides in 2009. From 2005 to 2007 the Veterans Affairs Department documented a 26 percent increase in the suicide rate among 18- to 29-year-old men who’ve left the military.

Hedges’ description of war as a drug applies to nations as well as soldiers. In a 2002 article adapted from his book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, he wrote: “The cost of kill­ing is all the more bitter because of the deep disillusionment that war usually brings.” And yet, before disillusionment comes irresistible attraction. Hedges says war suspends our self-critical thought and makes the world understandable, a “black and white tableau of us and them.”

Few find the strength to resist. Do we have the will?