thedrifter
08-30-05, 06:57 AM
There's 'Over There' -- and there's the real thing. Soldiers who served in Iraq share their views on the show.
- John Koopman, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
There's nothing funny about the new FX dramatic series, "Over There. " It's a gruesome depiction of men and women in combat. In Iraq.
So why were these men -- all combat veterans with the California National Guard -- chuckling?
"It's not a bad show, but they get so many things wrong," Sgt. 1st Class Norman Valdez said. "If real soldiers did half the things the guys do in the show, they'd be dead."
Valdez knows. He was over there for the better part of a year with A Company of the 579th Combat Engineer Battalion, based in Santa Rosa. He would have stayed the whole year, like the rest of the company, but he was wounded by a roadside bomb, the most common kind of attack you'll find in that dusty, sandy battlefield.
Valdez recently joined two other Northern California soldiers to watch the show for The Chronicle and discuss what's good and bad about it, and how it might affect public opinion about the continuing conflict on the other side of the world.
"I don't know, it's Hollywood," said Randel Dale, a 43-year-old staff sergeant from Lucerne (Lake County). "What can you expect?"
"Over There" has been hailed by most critics as a gritty, realistic drama. It's notable in that this is the first time a fictional show has aired while the war it describes is going on. Hollywood has churned out dozens of war- related shows -- "Combat," "M A S H," "China Beach," "Tour of Duty" to name a few. They always come out long after the bloodshed ends, when writers and directors have had time to absorb what happened and then dramatize it. And, for that matter, long after the public has had a chance to process the wars.
But Iraq is a new kind of war, and modern technology has changed lots of rules. Now, you have CNN and Al-Jazeera videotaping firefights and beaming the footage around the world in real time. Reporters embed with military units, getting up close and personal with the troops and the fighting.
"To tell the truth, I never watch the news or any media that has to do with Iraq," said Valdez, 42.
His attitude is not uncommon among troops who have been there. There is a strong sense that people in the States don't understand soldiers, don't understand what's going on in Iraq, they just don't get it.
"Over There" was supposed to help solve that problem. To a certain extent, it does.
The show gets a lot of things right. The uniforms, the weapons. The fighting is very real, from the sounds of AK-47s popping off to the "ping, ping, ping" of incoming machine gun fire.
Executive producer Steven Bochco hired a Marine staff sergeant, who had served two tours in Iraq, as a technical adviser.
Adding to the sense of realism is the language. "Over There" is on FX, a cable station, so the writers have much more latitude on swear words. Which means you won't hear the "f -- " word, despite its common use among soldiers and Marines.
But you will hear "s -- ." A lot. It's also helpful in that the word is used to describe Iraq in general. "This s -- hole," is the most common term associated with Iraq, in real life and in the show.
One thing you will not see, so far anyway, is much discussion about politics. Bochco has said in interviews that he did not want to express a political viewpoint. He said he simply wanted to dramatize the plight of men and women in combat.
"When your ass is on the block, politics is a luxury," Bochco said.
Still, there are little things, small comments that exhibit a small political slant.
"We didn't come here for the oil," a sergeant screams at Muslim insurgents as he leads a squad in attack. "We came to kick your ass!"
But that isn't necessarily real, either. Soldiers are no different than the population in general. For some, politics is a huge issue. Younger troops especially are likely to talk about the president, his policies and the war. Because their lives are on the line.
Meanwhile, in Santa Rosa, Valdez and Dale, along with Sgt. William Blosser, 33, of Healdsburg, sat at a conference table to watch the first couple of shows.
There are nods and knowing glances as they watch the main characters get ready for a tour in Iraq. In one scene, a young mother tries to explain to her infant how far away she'll be. She points to a sippy cup on the high-chair table and says that their home, and a Jell-O cup nearby is where grandma lives. Then she points to the far corner of the kitchen.
"Mommy will be over there in the garbage, OK, Spooky?" she says, putting on her cap. "I'll be back. Sometime next year."
The three National Guard soldiers all said that preparing to go to Iraq was a surreal experience. Their unit was called up, and they went for training in Texas. So there wasn't much thought of the implications until it was time to go.
"It didn't really sink in until we got to Kuwait," Dale said. "You see the sand and the heat and you think, 'What the hell am I doing here?' "
The soldiers in the show fly overseas, but there are no scenes of getting off the plane or acclimating or putting down gear in a new base. Immediately, the show cuts to the squad, pinned down behind a berm as machine gun fire rakes the dirt. Their squad leader, called Sergeant Scream for obvious reasons, screams, "I guaran-*******-tee one of you fools is going to do something stupid and get yourselves killed within a week."
"He needs to work on his people skills," Dale said with a grin.
That scene is typical of the way the show is set up. It tries to hit all sorts of buttons about the war, from Abu Ghraib to Al-Jazeera to roadside bombs to nameless special operations officers playing by their own rules. As such, it's fairly decent entertainment. It can be dark and brooding and bloody. Like real life.
The problem is, almost no one experiences all of those things. Not even in a yearlong tour.
Valdez, for example, was wounded when a roadside bomb went off as he was patrolling in a Humvee. The vehicle was not armored (a huge controversy in Iraq, but as of yet unaddressed in the show), but had what's known as "hillbilly armor," steel plates welded to doors and fenders. It didn't stop shrapnel from piercing his leg and arm.
Nor has the show addressed what these soldiers dealt with: performing a duty for which they were not trained. The male soldiers in "Over There" are infantry (the female roles are for a truck driver and mechanic). Valdez and Dale are trained as combat engineers, which means they either blow things up or build stuff the infantry needs, like roads or bridges. Blosser was a cook. But almost everyone in Iraq ends up on patrol, working as part infantry, part military police.
"It's real uncomfortable to get sent to Iraq to act as infantry," Blosser said.
In the first episode, the squad is part of a group of soldiers who have surrounded a mosque containing a leader of the insurgency. They cannot attack because an Al-Jazeera reporter is inside with a camera. The show deals with issues of the media, the Arab media, and more importantly, rules of engagement. The sergeant talks about when and how soldiers can return fire, which has been a constant issue facing troops since the moment the war started.
Eventually, the soldiers engage the enemy, killing several in explicit detail. In one scene, a soldier fires a grenade into the torso of an insurgent, blowing his upper body apart, his legs continuing to walk a couple of steps before falling to the ground.
"Hmmm, never seen anything like that," Valdez muttered.
In the second episode, the soldiers put up a vehicle checkpoint on a road. A car approaches but doesn't stop. They light it up, killing the two occupants. Then leave it there until morning to get an explosives ordnance team out there to check for booby traps. Of course, there are explosives and the car is ripped apart.
It would have been a good chance to show the difficulties of roadblock duties, because there have been numerous situations in which cars are shot up and people killed, but no weapons found.
The third episode deals with military intelligence and treatment of prisoners. The squad finds an insurgent leader in the trunk of a car at the checkpoint, and they're taking him in. They are waylaid by an intense intelligence operative who tells them he is countermanding their orders and taking control of their prisoner. It seems the man knows where some hijacked antiaircraft missiles are located.
The show deals with issues you've read about before, like Abu Ghraib. Here was an intelligence operative working under rules known only to him, but having more power than any of the regular Army types.
"We're ghosts, playing by ghost rules," he says.
The show has been widely panned by bloggers who are in the military, or once were. They have nitpicked all sorts of technical issues and some social ones. There is a scene in the beginning when one soldier smokes a joint directly in front of the motor pool, in full view in broad daylight. Some said that suggested that Hollywood is still run by people who are stuck in the '60s, in the Vietnam era. Soldiers might still toke up, but in the modern, volunteer professional Army, you would never do it like that.
Sgt. 1st Class Don Cuneo, also with the 579th, served in Vietnam as a Marine radio operator. He said he watched the first 15 minutes of "Over There, " then turned it off because he didn't feel it was accurate enough.
However, he said he likes what the show does for viewers in general. It gives people a broader look at troops under fire than they are likely to see on the nightly news.
"A show like this gives people a better understanding of what goes on with individual soldiers," Cuneo said. "They have to keep their minds on the war in order to survive, but they also have a lot of other things on their minds. Stuff going on back home that they know about because you do have phones and Internet access and such.
"It gives people the idea that these people are human beings."
The show can be thoughtful, too. There is a Muslim soldier from Detroit who explains Muslim religion and ideology to his buddies. There is an intellectual who left Cornell to join the army, who can be philosophical and sometimes says what is, essentially, truths about war, fighting and U.S. soldiers.
"The tragedy here is, we're savages," says the soldier, called "Dim." "We're thrilled to kill each other. We're monsters and war is what unmasks us. But there's kind of honor in it, too. A kind of grace. I guess if I'm a monster, it's my privilege to be one."
E-mail John Koopman at jkoopman@sfchronicle.com.
Ellie
- John Koopman, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
There's nothing funny about the new FX dramatic series, "Over There. " It's a gruesome depiction of men and women in combat. In Iraq.
So why were these men -- all combat veterans with the California National Guard -- chuckling?
"It's not a bad show, but they get so many things wrong," Sgt. 1st Class Norman Valdez said. "If real soldiers did half the things the guys do in the show, they'd be dead."
Valdez knows. He was over there for the better part of a year with A Company of the 579th Combat Engineer Battalion, based in Santa Rosa. He would have stayed the whole year, like the rest of the company, but he was wounded by a roadside bomb, the most common kind of attack you'll find in that dusty, sandy battlefield.
Valdez recently joined two other Northern California soldiers to watch the show for The Chronicle and discuss what's good and bad about it, and how it might affect public opinion about the continuing conflict on the other side of the world.
"I don't know, it's Hollywood," said Randel Dale, a 43-year-old staff sergeant from Lucerne (Lake County). "What can you expect?"
"Over There" has been hailed by most critics as a gritty, realistic drama. It's notable in that this is the first time a fictional show has aired while the war it describes is going on. Hollywood has churned out dozens of war- related shows -- "Combat," "M A S H," "China Beach," "Tour of Duty" to name a few. They always come out long after the bloodshed ends, when writers and directors have had time to absorb what happened and then dramatize it. And, for that matter, long after the public has had a chance to process the wars.
But Iraq is a new kind of war, and modern technology has changed lots of rules. Now, you have CNN and Al-Jazeera videotaping firefights and beaming the footage around the world in real time. Reporters embed with military units, getting up close and personal with the troops and the fighting.
"To tell the truth, I never watch the news or any media that has to do with Iraq," said Valdez, 42.
His attitude is not uncommon among troops who have been there. There is a strong sense that people in the States don't understand soldiers, don't understand what's going on in Iraq, they just don't get it.
"Over There" was supposed to help solve that problem. To a certain extent, it does.
The show gets a lot of things right. The uniforms, the weapons. The fighting is very real, from the sounds of AK-47s popping off to the "ping, ping, ping" of incoming machine gun fire.
Executive producer Steven Bochco hired a Marine staff sergeant, who had served two tours in Iraq, as a technical adviser.
Adding to the sense of realism is the language. "Over There" is on FX, a cable station, so the writers have much more latitude on swear words. Which means you won't hear the "f -- " word, despite its common use among soldiers and Marines.
But you will hear "s -- ." A lot. It's also helpful in that the word is used to describe Iraq in general. "This s -- hole," is the most common term associated with Iraq, in real life and in the show.
One thing you will not see, so far anyway, is much discussion about politics. Bochco has said in interviews that he did not want to express a political viewpoint. He said he simply wanted to dramatize the plight of men and women in combat.
"When your ass is on the block, politics is a luxury," Bochco said.
Still, there are little things, small comments that exhibit a small political slant.
"We didn't come here for the oil," a sergeant screams at Muslim insurgents as he leads a squad in attack. "We came to kick your ass!"
But that isn't necessarily real, either. Soldiers are no different than the population in general. For some, politics is a huge issue. Younger troops especially are likely to talk about the president, his policies and the war. Because their lives are on the line.
Meanwhile, in Santa Rosa, Valdez and Dale, along with Sgt. William Blosser, 33, of Healdsburg, sat at a conference table to watch the first couple of shows.
There are nods and knowing glances as they watch the main characters get ready for a tour in Iraq. In one scene, a young mother tries to explain to her infant how far away she'll be. She points to a sippy cup on the high-chair table and says that their home, and a Jell-O cup nearby is where grandma lives. Then she points to the far corner of the kitchen.
"Mommy will be over there in the garbage, OK, Spooky?" she says, putting on her cap. "I'll be back. Sometime next year."
The three National Guard soldiers all said that preparing to go to Iraq was a surreal experience. Their unit was called up, and they went for training in Texas. So there wasn't much thought of the implications until it was time to go.
"It didn't really sink in until we got to Kuwait," Dale said. "You see the sand and the heat and you think, 'What the hell am I doing here?' "
The soldiers in the show fly overseas, but there are no scenes of getting off the plane or acclimating or putting down gear in a new base. Immediately, the show cuts to the squad, pinned down behind a berm as machine gun fire rakes the dirt. Their squad leader, called Sergeant Scream for obvious reasons, screams, "I guaran-*******-tee one of you fools is going to do something stupid and get yourselves killed within a week."
"He needs to work on his people skills," Dale said with a grin.
That scene is typical of the way the show is set up. It tries to hit all sorts of buttons about the war, from Abu Ghraib to Al-Jazeera to roadside bombs to nameless special operations officers playing by their own rules. As such, it's fairly decent entertainment. It can be dark and brooding and bloody. Like real life.
The problem is, almost no one experiences all of those things. Not even in a yearlong tour.
Valdez, for example, was wounded when a roadside bomb went off as he was patrolling in a Humvee. The vehicle was not armored (a huge controversy in Iraq, but as of yet unaddressed in the show), but had what's known as "hillbilly armor," steel plates welded to doors and fenders. It didn't stop shrapnel from piercing his leg and arm.
Nor has the show addressed what these soldiers dealt with: performing a duty for which they were not trained. The male soldiers in "Over There" are infantry (the female roles are for a truck driver and mechanic). Valdez and Dale are trained as combat engineers, which means they either blow things up or build stuff the infantry needs, like roads or bridges. Blosser was a cook. But almost everyone in Iraq ends up on patrol, working as part infantry, part military police.
"It's real uncomfortable to get sent to Iraq to act as infantry," Blosser said.
In the first episode, the squad is part of a group of soldiers who have surrounded a mosque containing a leader of the insurgency. They cannot attack because an Al-Jazeera reporter is inside with a camera. The show deals with issues of the media, the Arab media, and more importantly, rules of engagement. The sergeant talks about when and how soldiers can return fire, which has been a constant issue facing troops since the moment the war started.
Eventually, the soldiers engage the enemy, killing several in explicit detail. In one scene, a soldier fires a grenade into the torso of an insurgent, blowing his upper body apart, his legs continuing to walk a couple of steps before falling to the ground.
"Hmmm, never seen anything like that," Valdez muttered.
In the second episode, the soldiers put up a vehicle checkpoint on a road. A car approaches but doesn't stop. They light it up, killing the two occupants. Then leave it there until morning to get an explosives ordnance team out there to check for booby traps. Of course, there are explosives and the car is ripped apart.
It would have been a good chance to show the difficulties of roadblock duties, because there have been numerous situations in which cars are shot up and people killed, but no weapons found.
The third episode deals with military intelligence and treatment of prisoners. The squad finds an insurgent leader in the trunk of a car at the checkpoint, and they're taking him in. They are waylaid by an intense intelligence operative who tells them he is countermanding their orders and taking control of their prisoner. It seems the man knows where some hijacked antiaircraft missiles are located.
The show deals with issues you've read about before, like Abu Ghraib. Here was an intelligence operative working under rules known only to him, but having more power than any of the regular Army types.
"We're ghosts, playing by ghost rules," he says.
The show has been widely panned by bloggers who are in the military, or once were. They have nitpicked all sorts of technical issues and some social ones. There is a scene in the beginning when one soldier smokes a joint directly in front of the motor pool, in full view in broad daylight. Some said that suggested that Hollywood is still run by people who are stuck in the '60s, in the Vietnam era. Soldiers might still toke up, but in the modern, volunteer professional Army, you would never do it like that.
Sgt. 1st Class Don Cuneo, also with the 579th, served in Vietnam as a Marine radio operator. He said he watched the first 15 minutes of "Over There, " then turned it off because he didn't feel it was accurate enough.
However, he said he likes what the show does for viewers in general. It gives people a broader look at troops under fire than they are likely to see on the nightly news.
"A show like this gives people a better understanding of what goes on with individual soldiers," Cuneo said. "They have to keep their minds on the war in order to survive, but they also have a lot of other things on their minds. Stuff going on back home that they know about because you do have phones and Internet access and such.
"It gives people the idea that these people are human beings."
The show can be thoughtful, too. There is a Muslim soldier from Detroit who explains Muslim religion and ideology to his buddies. There is an intellectual who left Cornell to join the army, who can be philosophical and sometimes says what is, essentially, truths about war, fighting and U.S. soldiers.
"The tragedy here is, we're savages," says the soldier, called "Dim." "We're thrilled to kill each other. We're monsters and war is what unmasks us. But there's kind of honor in it, too. A kind of grace. I guess if I'm a monster, it's my privilege to be one."
E-mail John Koopman at jkoopman@sfchronicle.com.
Ellie