Human cost of war in focus
TV series on ‘‘Black Sunday’’ Baghdad ambush wants to tell the truth about war and the pain it inflicts on soldiers’ families, writes Michael Idato.
American journalist Martha Raddatz, the chief global affairs correspondent for the US ABC network and the author of the book The Long Road Home: A Story of War and Family, has no qualms about calling out lousy war movies.
‘‘Oh, I can go to a movie theatre and say, that’s s...,’’ the 64-year-old reporter says, laughing. ‘‘Yes, I can.’’
Raddatz has the rare sideline perspective of a veteran war correspondent: she is not a soldier, but she has stood shoulder to shoulder with many and attempted to bring their stories home to her audience.
But interpreting war through the prism of news channels is complex, and often leaves us with either an unreal sense of what actually occurs in the field of battle, or worse, creates an artificial emphasis on very specific situations which lack the context of the broader landscape.
The most common error, Raddatz says, is misunderstanding the ordinariness of the soldier’s life.
‘‘I hate stick-figure, actionfigure movies; it’s not that way, it’s just not, they’re complicated people and they have complicated family lives,’’ she says.
‘‘They’ve been in a pickup truck two weeks before taking their kids to school, they’ve gone from the minivan to the humvee, just like that,’’ she adds. ‘‘And they’re getting shot at and that is an experience; I’ve been there but I wasn’t carrying a weapon and I didn’t have to run and protect the buddy next to me.’’
The Long Road Home has been turned into an eight-part television drama by the National Geographic channel, exploring the events of April 4, 2004, when the First Cavalry Division from Fort Hood was ambushed in Baghdad. They events were later named ‘‘Black Sunday’’.
The adaptation, written and produced by Mikko Alanne and executive produced by Jason Clark and Mike Medavoy, stars Michael Kelly as Lt Colonel Gary Volesky, Jason Ritter as Captain Troy Denomy, Sarah Wayne Callies as Volesky’s wife LeAnn, Kate Bosworth as Denomy’s wife Gina and Jeremy Sisto as Staff Sergeant Robert Miltenberger.
For Raddatz, experiencing the theatre of war personally meant she had no choice but to fight to keep the story authentic and true to life, lest it be Hollywood-ised.
‘‘Once you see that humanity, that’s what you want to see, that’s what you want to convey to people,’’ she says. ‘‘You don’t want it to be action figures because they’re not and they will carry this the rest of their lives.’’
The genesis of the television series dates back almost a decade, when Alanne was sent a copy of Raddatz’s book by Medavoy. ‘‘It was probably the most remarkable piece of war reporting I had ever read,’’ Alanne says. ‘‘It felt like we talk so much about bravery and sacrifice when it comes to our soldiers and their families but this was the first time you really got to live with the families through that event,’’ Alanne says. ‘‘For the first time I really started to understand what that experience was like.’’
Medavoy also gave a copy of the book to Clark. ‘‘I said, if I were to do this I’d want to do is as a mini-series and I’d want it to last exactly as long as those guys were pinned down,’’ Clark says. ‘‘And I want people to have the visceral experience of that length of time ... so we can get intimate and understand all of the facets of all the characters.’’
In truth, most Hollywood productions tell Hollywood versions of their stories. The Missing is a recent example of a series which attempted to step into an authentic space – with the unusually dark theme of a child abduction – with very confronting results.
Similarly, Medavoy says, The Long Road Home’s battlefield is tough.
‘‘You tell the story in eight hours and in those eight hours we take each hour and break it down,’’ Medavoy says. ‘‘We tell the story of one person in each hour, essentially, but we know that there are a lot of other things going on at the same time.’’
The distinct structure of the story means it approaches the narrative from eight points of view, Alanne says. ‘‘We have eight people who had different compelling stories so we could tell the totality of the experience,’’ he says.
Central to the project was the idea of allowing the characters to step to the fore, so that the theatre of war, while very present, did not distract from the story. ‘‘I think when you think about war in general, after a while you become numb to combat but you don’t become numb to watching people that you have fallen in love with,’’ Alanne says.
‘‘That was my goal with the first episode that you would really fall in love with the families the way I did when I read their stories. If this was eight hours of Black Hawk Down, it would just be too brutal and faceless.’’
Clarke concurs, noting that audiences are to some extent inured to ‘‘action and death, especially when it comes to the military with all the video games and movies that we’ve seen; it’s all sort of, like, eh, that’s what happens, people die. But meeting these people, meeting the wives, meeting the families, that to me does it.’’
‘ After a while you become numb to combat but you don’t become numb to watching people that you have fallen in love with.’ WRITER AND PRODUCER MIKKO ALANNE
● The Long Road Home, National Geographic, Tuesday, 8.30pm.