Where Movies Meet Reality. Or, Zero Dark Thirty at Noon

I don't want to get into the habit of making my weekly blog post about movies I've recently seen; that feels a bit like cheating and I don't have that much interesting to say about movies anyway. I probably shouldn't worry about it becoming habit since I'm averaging about five movies a year these days. But I wanted to write about this one in particular because of a certain juxtaposition with events that happened directly after seeing it.

Yesterday I had some free time and I hadn't seen my brother in about a month so I talked him into going to see a movie. I've really wanted to see Zero Dark Thirty and it looked too intense for Robyn so it  was a good choice for us. To keep my critique to a minimum, let me just say the movie was superb. What you need to know is that the movie is about The War on Terrorism. It spans both the Bush and Obama administrations and is told mainly from the point of view of the CIA. It culminates with the now famous Bin Laden raid. The movie takes place across the globe but spends most of its time lingering over real events in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

After our noon viewing of the movie I drove my brother back to his house. He lives on Moffett Field, which is technically a NASA installation but it welcomes military families from all branches of the service in their small housing area. It's a mixed bag there, they have army and marines for sure and I think some air force and navy families as well, but it's a very small community. There are perhaps fifty buildings that home a few hundred families. Four or five streets run north to south and the same number crisscross them east to west. Once you enter the housing area, driving to my brothers house takes about two minutes and requires that you pass just about every other house before arriving at his. If you hate the monotony that some suburban housing developments have made famous, then the stark sameness of military housing might drive you mad.

We turned down one of these streets lined with houses of muted browns and grays; here we immediately saw two things. In the foreground a group of kids congregated around a small makeshift lemonade-stand, and in the background four or five cop cars were parked outside one of the homes. It seemed apparent that the kids were using the lemonade-stand as an excuse to stand around and gawk at the happenings further down the street. Between the parked cars and the sparse trees it wasn't obvious what the police were doing but my brother said, "Oh no, not again. This guy has had it rough."

At this point I wish I were a painter or photographer rather than a writer. As we drew closer we saw what is in my mind perhaps the most iconic image I've ever witnessed. I hesitate to even explain, as I'm certain I won't do it justice. On the door frame of the house hung a single red flag with the small yellowish symbols that are peculiar to the U.S. Marines. Below the flag sat a man in shorts and a tank-top. His chest and arms had a few tattoos that further marked him as a military man. But his most obvious badges of service were his missing legs and the wheelchair he sat in. His eyes and face--they haunt me already--stared blankly ahead. He looked not at the cops nor at the children a little ways off, instead he stared at the empty space between the two groups. At one point we were in his line of sight but I'm certain he looked right through us, into some other world. At his side sat a full grown black Labrador. One hand rested on the dog's head, the other in his lap.

The police officers formed a misshapen semicircle around him. No one appeared to be in charge. They all looked uncomfortable in their uniforms. Their body language hinted at a resistance to the task at hand, their shoulders drooped with regret and their knees bent with sadness, or maybe respect. The cops stood around and the man and his dog sat still, all waited for something to happen. But all that happened was two brothers drove by in a car none of them will likely remember. We rounded the next corner and they were gone from our sight.

My brother explained that the man had lost his legs in Iraq, which seemed obvious, but he also lost his hearing and large parts of his cognitive abilities. He can't speak. He has a wife and a baby that was merely months old when he was wounded. We saw neither as we passed by. Who knows how much pain we've collectively created here in just one house, much less across the country and across the world.

Later I went skateboarding with my nephew through the neighborhood and out around the base. We looked at the machines of war that are littered across the base. It being a NASA installation they only have a few such machines and most of them are out of service. We passed below the blimp hanger that is under repair. They've stripped it of its paneling and have just started putting new ones up. We marveled at the things man can build and fix, like a skeleton getting its skin reapplied.

My nephew stopped at the housing office to look for candy (I've been sworn to secrecy on whether or not he found any). While he scavenged I skated ahead a little ways and then took a seat on the curb to wait for him. Without being aware of it I'd sat down ten or fifteen feet from where the man sat an hour earlier. Everyone had cleared out, the kids, the cops, the man, the dog. I tried for a moment to imagine how he experienced the world. What it might be like to sit in that chair. To be surrounded by silence and confusion. And I failed. All I saw was grass and houses and trees, heard the freeway in the distance. I've likely been more successful sitting on a plane trying to imagine what a bird might think as it flies. I looked up at his flag still blowing in the breeze and wondered to myself how it is we can fix that blimp hanger out there with ease while it seems like there is so little we can do for a broken man.

Ten years from now I might not remember too much about what happened in that theater. But the images from the day will probably play through my mind like a movie for the rest of my life.