Marc
We own the day, Charlie owns the night.
Seriously, watched two of the most depressing documentaries ever this morning. And considering the fact that my track record with documentaries just ain't all that spectacular, I'm amazed I didn't break down like a sobby little wimp today in either of my classes. Video One was about a small Bosnian town filled with Bosnian Muslims and Croatian Catholics, and it started out all sweet and nice about how they all live together in relative harmony, and it showed two older women ***1*** having coffee together, all the while talking about how they would gladly give half of what they had to each other during the rough times ahead. And, rough times indeed did come. During the entire course of the film you can hear shelling going on in the distant background, but still it rattles the people in the video very little. "That's the other town," they say as they chop wood and make bread, and one man was pissed cause his wife made him wash dishes with her outside, but the factory that he used to work in had been closed for close to a year, so what the hell else did he have to do? By the end of the film the Muslim homes in the town are in ruins, and the primary family that the filmmakers had been following around were nowhere to be found ***2***. After some serious searching, with an armed UN escort, they find them in the town across the mountains, reunited with both the young son and the married daughter, and other Muslims from the town, all of them crying, and falling all over themselves to get to the female documentary maker because they all thought that she had somehow died, and it was seriously one of the hardest things I've ever had to watch in class, and I had to choke back tears. Even now ... ugh.
So, I look forward to my second class, the one that's just a flight of stairs up, and ten minutes after that horribly depressing footage. Yet, when I sit down I see that this professor ***3*** is preparing us for a video, which is fine. Hopefully it will be interesting, I tell myself. Video Two = HBO documentary about Vietnam, and immediately I think that there's a slim chance I might just happen to see my dad in some of the footage, but I don't really hold my breath on it. They show grim battle shots -- people being airlifted, dead men, a sergeant of some sort in a makeshift hospital tent talking about how he's most likely going to lose his leg but he would've been damned if he called in a napalm strike on the enemy cause he just couldn't bear to see it ***4***. The most striking scenes were the letters of the GI's themselves being read by celebrities ***5***, and after a few of these heartfelt (and sometimes funny) letters, they flash up the photos of the men, who seemed to die within the next month or two.
I was so horrified by it all I had to call my dad this afternoon to say "hello". Turns out he spent two years and some odd days in-country ***6***, and we've talked about it a bit before, but not that much, yet there was a scene in the film where a guy was carrying a mail bag, and I thought, just maybe, that it kind of looked like him, but most likely not. He informed me that the only time he remembered being around a camera crew while he was there was during the one Bob Hope USO show he went to. I imagine it was probably a very cheesy affair, minus the scantily clad women. I still can't imagine what war must feel like, must be like. I've been told by my dad that you don't expect to come out alive, so you kind of live accordingly. He says you find out what kind of a person you truly are when you're faced with something like that, and I can say without a shadow of doubt that my dad is one of the strongest men I've ever met. I've never seen anyone take on so much responsibility and deal with it so head on. Not effortlessly. Just head on.
I'm almost at a loss for words.
***1*** who had known each other for 40+ years
***2*** you see them, twice, send their youngest boy away to the town over the mountains to stay with his recently married sister. Each time the mother is weeping uncontrollably, and the father looks directly into the camera and spouts off some kind of saying like, "We'll never leave here. I've spent twenty years building this house, and this life, and it's all we've got. We've got to get along [with out neighbors] or we are sunk."
***3*** American History, 1945 - present.
***4*** which, for some reason, I found to be totally noble, as in noble like it goes against that Apocalypse Now image we all have of Robert Duvall and the surfboards and the napalm strike, and whatnot. This guy was in serious pain, yet he's calmly talking about how he couldn't have done it, and I hope he was alright. It was a senseless war, anyways. Why inflict random, pointless suffering on people you can't even see?
***5*** a particularly humorous one was Michael J. Fox reading a letter from a man to his wife thanking her for the wingtips, yet wondering where, exactly, in Vietnam he's supposed to wear them.
***6*** he knows how long he was there down to the exact minute, which I don't find nerdy or suprising at all. I have the utmost respect for the man.
We own the day, Charlie owns the night.
Seriously, watched two of the most depressing documentaries ever this morning. And considering the fact that my track record with documentaries just ain't all that spectacular, I'm amazed I didn't break down like a sobby little wimp today in either of my classes. Video One was about a small Bosnian town filled with Bosnian Muslims and Croatian Catholics, and it started out all sweet and nice about how they all live together in relative harmony, and it showed two older women ***1*** having coffee together, all the while talking about how they would gladly give half of what they had to each other during the rough times ahead. And, rough times indeed did come. During the entire course of the film you can hear shelling going on in the distant background, but still it rattles the people in the video very little. "That's the other town," they say as they chop wood and make bread, and one man was pissed cause his wife made him wash dishes with her outside, but the factory that he used to work in had been closed for close to a year, so what the hell else did he have to do? By the end of the film the Muslim homes in the town are in ruins, and the primary family that the filmmakers had been following around were nowhere to be found ***2***. After some serious searching, with an armed UN escort, they find them in the town across the mountains, reunited with both the young son and the married daughter, and other Muslims from the town, all of them crying, and falling all over themselves to get to the female documentary maker because they all thought that she had somehow died, and it was seriously one of the hardest things I've ever had to watch in class, and I had to choke back tears. Even now ... ugh.
So, I look forward to my second class, the one that's just a flight of stairs up, and ten minutes after that horribly depressing footage. Yet, when I sit down I see that this professor ***3*** is preparing us for a video, which is fine. Hopefully it will be interesting, I tell myself. Video Two = HBO documentary about Vietnam, and immediately I think that there's a slim chance I might just happen to see my dad in some of the footage, but I don't really hold my breath on it. They show grim battle shots -- people being airlifted, dead men, a sergeant of some sort in a makeshift hospital tent talking about how he's most likely going to lose his leg but he would've been damned if he called in a napalm strike on the enemy cause he just couldn't bear to see it ***4***. The most striking scenes were the letters of the GI's themselves being read by celebrities ***5***, and after a few of these heartfelt (and sometimes funny) letters, they flash up the photos of the men, who seemed to die within the next month or two.
I was so horrified by it all I had to call my dad this afternoon to say "hello". Turns out he spent two years and some odd days in-country ***6***, and we've talked about it a bit before, but not that much, yet there was a scene in the film where a guy was carrying a mail bag, and I thought, just maybe, that it kind of looked like him, but most likely not. He informed me that the only time he remembered being around a camera crew while he was there was during the one Bob Hope USO show he went to. I imagine it was probably a very cheesy affair, minus the scantily clad women. I still can't imagine what war must feel like, must be like. I've been told by my dad that you don't expect to come out alive, so you kind of live accordingly. He says you find out what kind of a person you truly are when you're faced with something like that, and I can say without a shadow of doubt that my dad is one of the strongest men I've ever met. I've never seen anyone take on so much responsibility and deal with it so head on. Not effortlessly. Just head on.
I'm almost at a loss for words.
***1*** who had known each other for 40+ years
***2*** you see them, twice, send their youngest boy away to the town over the mountains to stay with his recently married sister. Each time the mother is weeping uncontrollably, and the father looks directly into the camera and spouts off some kind of saying like, "We'll never leave here. I've spent twenty years building this house, and this life, and it's all we've got. We've got to get along [with out neighbors] or we are sunk."
***3*** American History, 1945 - present.
***4*** which, for some reason, I found to be totally noble, as in noble like it goes against that Apocalypse Now image we all have of Robert Duvall and the surfboards and the napalm strike, and whatnot. This guy was in serious pain, yet he's calmly talking about how he couldn't have done it, and I hope he was alright. It was a senseless war, anyways. Why inflict random, pointless suffering on people you can't even see?
***5*** a particularly humorous one was Michael J. Fox reading a letter from a man to his wife thanking her for the wingtips, yet wondering where, exactly, in Vietnam he's supposed to wear them.
***6*** he knows how long he was there down to the exact minute, which I don't find nerdy or suprising at all. I have the utmost respect for the man.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home