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The Critic of Mosul

Joseph S. Pete

    The men hadn’t seen Sgt. Wampler so animated since a potshot clanged off one of the humvees in their convoy, provoking them to shred the landscape of clay-brick buildings, broken-down Opels and hillocks of rubbish with .50-caliber machine gun rounds. Wampler, like everyone else in the platoon who had been in a turret, swore he had smoked at least three insurgents, that he had clean shots, that he had seen puffs of blood mist.
    The lieutenant reported eight enemy KIA, even though they hadn’t had time to stop to investigate.
    Wampler was as loud and spittle-lipped as he had been after that first engagement while fulminating against the Iraq war flick that Pvt. Pine had grabbed at a hajji shop and that they were watching on a laptop in a barracks trailer at a base on the outskirts of Mosul.
    No unit that small would chase insurgents outside the wire without calling in reinforcements to at least set up a perimeter, Wampler objected in a voice that a face-painted fan in Section 32B would employ. No soldier would ever clear a room like that on his own. An M-4 magazine doesn’t have that many rounds in it; that guy should have reloaded five minutes ago.
    Wampler raged at every detail, from the shooting positions the actors took to the uniform patches they wore. Pine protested that it was just a movie and that he should relax and enjoy it for what it was.
    But he was corrected, quick. Wampler burst out with a rant about how all anyone eventually would remember would be the movies, that this bulldung would be the official record, that such a wildly inaccurate depiction shouldn’t be the popular history. The documentaries are better, but no one watches them, he said.
    Pvt. Forrest ventured that Wampler should be a Hollywood consultant when he got out of the sandbox.
    Wampler, who already had reenlisted for another four years and almost certainly would be in uniform until he could draw a pension, then decided that 20 minutes of such garbage was all he could bear.
    “To hell with this, I’m going to go play Call of Duty,” he said. “That was a real war. Our forefathers didn’t sit around in France watching Lee Marvin blow away the entire Third Reich on some goddamned screen. It’s not a real war if you can see a movie about it while you’re there.”
    For the rest of the deployment, whenever the men killed downtime with DVDs, passed out soccer balls to the street urchin children or gnawed through the overcooked butt steak served every Sunday at the chow hall, Wampler complained that Iraq didn’t measure up to the real wars that he had seen in his living room and at movie theaters.
    But when they returned home, Wampler gave another account at every bar he plunked his elbows on. No one he talked to understood what war really was. They could never understand.

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