Subject
In 1945, the island of Iwo Jima was the site of a 35-day battle. The attackers were American forces trying to seize an air base near the Japanese "home islands." The defenders were deeply entrenched Japanese forces under orders to fight to the last man. The battle is famous less for its strategic significance than for a photograph of six American troops raising a flag at the summit of the mountain at the southwestern tip of the island. Three of those troops were killed as the battle progressed. The other three were whisked back to the US to go on tour raising money for the war effort; Flags of Our Fathers is their story.

Letters from Iwo Jima
Iris Yamashita, Paul Haggis, Tadamichi Kuribayashi, Tsuyoko Yoshido, and Clint Eastwood, 2006

Subject
In 1945, the island of Iwo Jima was the site of a 35-day battle. The attackers were American forces trying to seize an air base near the Japanese "home islands." The defenders were deeply entrenched Japanese forces under orders to fight to the last man; Letters from Iwo Jima is their story.

Reaction
These aren't great films but the mere fact that they exist is impressive, given that they bear a number of messages that fall outside mainstream American discourse about war:

• While not everyone gets killed in a war, everyone comes back broken. Some are crippled by post-traumatic stress, and even the high-functioning ones are haunted by their experiences for the rest of their days.

• Our symbols rarely match up with reality. People think in symbols. They look at a photograph of some guys lifting a pole with a piece of cloth stuck to it and think they're seeing Heroism. And so you wind up with these three guys getting whisked off the battlefield to re-enact lifting a pole with a piece of cloth stuck to it while standing on top of papier-mâché mountains in Midwestern football stadiums. Which is just heartbreakingly stupid when you think about it. So usually we don't.

• What separates soldiers on a battlefield is laundry. In The Dispossessed, Shevek is appalled at the way Urrastis conduct war. It's not the violence he objects to: on Anarres, people often settle disputes with their fists. It's the idea of killing people you have nothing against that shocks him. To Shevek, a culture that valorizes taking someone's life on someone else's initiative is a sick culture. And this is obviously true! And yet stating this obvious truth tends to get you branded as a kook even by supposed liberals such as Markos Moulitsas. The leftmost end of our discourse on war is occupied by people like those who put up a memorial near the Lafayette BART station for American casualties in Iraq, or Garry Trudeau who runs a list of American war dead in the Sunday edition of Doonesbury every May, who get attacked by the right-wing noise machine for undermining the war effort. But why should I care for dead Americans more than for anyone else? Just because they're wearing speckly gray outfits? What about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi victims — you know, the ones who didn't even volunteer to be there?

Say this on a talk show and you'll probably get your mike cut off. So it's pretty surprising that these films made it into theaters. Of course, once they got there, they played to small audiences of people who probably already agreed with them. Now, as noted, these films aren't great art. Flags is dull and doesn't offer a lot in the way of characterization, and Letters from Iwo Jima gets ham-handed in making its point — having gotten to know the Japanese soldiers, who are much more likeable than the American grunts in Flags, we don't need speeches about how much we might like the guys on the other side if only we got to know them. But I still wish that some of the people who ride around with "Support Our Troops" magnets on their SUVs had seen Letters and spent a couple of hours pleading that the GIs not kill this poor baker who's been taken from his pregnant wife and forced into uniform. Yes, it's clumsy and sentimental, but this sort of thing is still going on and we need more reminders.

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