Bob Herbert: Warfare as it really is

Bob Herbert's latest column in the New York Times has me wishing I got HBO. Hopefully the documentary he describes will eventually make it onto DVD. It sounds like something that everyone needs to see -- to get a dose of the reality of war, rather than the sanitized version we get from the American mainstream media.

An excerpt of Herbert's piece, via truthout.org:
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In the first few moments of the documentary film "Baghdad ER," we see a man dressed in hospital scrubs carrying a bloodied arm that has been amputated above the elbow. He deposits it in a large red plastic bag.

This HBO production is reality television with a vengeance - warfare as it really is. And while it is frightening, harrowing and deeply painful to watch, it should be required viewing for all but the youngest Americans. It will premiere May 21.

For two months in 2005, the directors Jon Alpert and Matthew O'Neill were given unprecedented access by the Army to the 86th Combat Support Hospital in the Green Zone in Baghdad. Working 12-hour shifts, they watched - and taped - the heroic struggle of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel to salvage as many lives as possible from what amounted to a nonstop conveyor be?t of bloodied, broken and burned G.I.'s.

At one point in the film, a specialist who survived a roadside bomb attack murmurs from a stretcher, "It was the worst thing I ever saw in my life, sir."

"What was that?" he is asked.

Recalling his last view of a buddy who was killed in the attack, he says, "My friend didn't have a face."

The movie is neither pro-war nor anti-war. It is simply a searing record of the ferocious toll that combat takes on real human beings.

In an interview, Mr. Alpert described "the shock of seeing human beings twisted into these horrible shapes, with parts missing and parts being detached from them." In the first couple of hours after he and Mr. O'Neill had arrived at the hospital, he said, "We had already seen two amputations and they were prepping someone else for another one."

Before long, he said, the effort to document the daily activities became psychologically grueling because "you just knew that every single day that door was going to open up, that the helicopter was going to land, and they were just going to bring in something that looked like hamburger instead of a human being."

Above all else, war is about the suffering of individuals. The suffering is endured mostly by the young, and these days the government and the media are careful to keep the worst of it out of the sight of the average American. That way we can worry in peace about the cost of the gasoline we need to get us to the mall.
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[Read more.]

And, coincidentally, yesterday was the three-year anniversary of George W. Bush's proclamation that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."

Then I guess the ongoing carnage is just minor combat operations.

I'm sure the families of the soldiers and civilians who have died since "mission accomplished" -- as well as all the injured -- do not think of it as minor.