Last night on television Helen Brown A frank look at wars fought on and off the battlefield
Abright blue billboard advertising a ginseng drink struck an odd note against the pockmarked concrete of Kabul. The drink may have relaxing properties, but I doubt it would make a dent in the stress levels of those living in the capital of one of the world’s most dangerous countries, which is under siege from both the Taliban and the so-called Islamic State.
It was in Afghanistan that ex-special Forces soldier Jason Fox developed the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which saw him discharged from the military in April 2012. The Final
Mission: Foxy’s War (Channel 4) was an attempt to make sense of what caused the breakdown of this man, and of the country.
Softly spoken, the SAS: Who Dares Wins host didn’t use therapy speak. He just said being at war had become addictive, “like crack”. He made his point with a photograph taken minutes after a gunfight, in which he looked as high as a Kabul kite. The crash came soon afterwards and he lost his “military mojo”. The hardest and most complicated part of Fox’s PTSD was “mourning for when I felt most alive”. Fox found civvy street much more difficult than Army life and was frank about the day he almost
threw himself off a cliff.
Warily returning to Afghanistan, Fox didn’t try to dig into the soul of the people like Ben Zand, whose BBC documentary aired last autumn, had done. His interview technique was a weakness and he got short, evasive answers to wandering questions. But the former soldier did take a camera into situations that spoke more clearly than any words. We saw wounded children fitted with prosthetic limbs; British soldiers driving “armoured ubers” for aid workers; and young women climbing a mountain to prove that “Afghan woman don’t exist to be oppressed or locked in the house, we can also fly!”
Today Fox likes to say he’s “fixed”. The same can’t be said for Afghanistan, where civilian casualties reached a record figure of more than 3,000 last year. Fox hopes that his service helped keep some Afghani people safe. But it’s hard to have high hopes for the future. When he asked a boy recently mutilated in a rocket attack what he would like to do when he grew up, the boy smiled and replied, “nothing”.
In April 1989, five teenagers (four black and one Hispanic) were arrested for the rape and near-fatal assault of a wealthy, young white woman in New York’s Central Park.
The victim, Trisha Meili, has no memory of that night.
Although there was no physical evidence linking the boys to the brutal attack, Raymond Santana, 14; Kevin Richardson, 14; Yusuf Salaam, 15; Antron Mccray, 15; and Korey Wise, 16, were all convicted of the crime. The real identities of all involved were subsumed by the case: Meili became “the Central Park Jogger”, and the boys became “the Central Park Five”.
This devastating miniseries restored the individual humanity to the six vulnerable humans at centre of the case. Written and directed by Ava Duvernay, the fact-based drama When
They See Us (Netflix) revealed how the teenagers became pawns in a bigger game. The first episode showed how regular teen lives were destroyed by a decision to go to the park. And we saw police coerce confessions from scared kids who just wanted to go home.
In the second, we watched as a reporter created a narrative in which black kids from “a world of crack, welfare, guns” are “driven” to make random attacks on white people. We saw the shock on the face of one boy’s mother when she learnt that Donald Trump had taken out full-page advertisements in four newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty. Episodes three and four took us through the brutality of prison time and the grim reality of life as an ex-con.
If those boys had been executed as Trump wanted, they would never have lived to see serial rapist Matias Reyes confess to the crime (providing case-clinching DNA) in 2002, or receive the $41million compensation that Trump called a “heist”.
In an age of fast-paced, plot-twisting crime TV, the awful momentum of this series felt agonisingly slow and predictable at times: like a perfectly aimed bowling ball travelling in slow motion. The emotional weight of Duvernay’s respect for the physical and emotional facts settled slowly in your stomach. You wanted to cheer when the wrongful convictions were vacated. But the sight of the now grown men returning to their childhood bedrooms hollowed the triumph.
The Final Mission: Foxy’s War When You See Us