Still of Robert Duvall as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in the movie “Apocalypse Now.”
Ironically, “The Archives” advertisement on the Rolling Stone web page for “The Runaway General,” journalist Michael Hastings highly controversial feature on Gen. Stanley McChrystal, points to Cameron Crowe’s travelogue of a Led Zeppelin tour from the 1970s. It is ironic because Hastings piece reads so much like the screenplay of Crowe’s semi-autographical rock and roll road picture “Almost Famous.”
Hastings followed around McChrystal, head of the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan, and his staff for the better part of a week as they waited for the early May flight ban across Europe caused by the Icelandic volcano. Out of their element and forced to do the sort of cookie pushing, snake-eating special operators don’t much like doing, they cracked jokes, complained and were generally miserable in the company of a freelance reporter.
Again and again in Crowe’s film, actor Jason Lee, playing the lead singer of fictional 70s rock act Stillwater, less British, but no less excessive than Led Zep, refers to the young proto-Crowe as “the enemy,” and for good reason. To make the cover of the Rolling Stone represents rock star celebrity, but to make that cover also carries with it the baggage for being exposed as less than perfect, human — even fallible.
I wonder if, again and again, one of McChrystal’s staffers reminded his brother officers and staffers that Hastings (despite his time in Iraq and the loss of his would-be fiancée in a convoy ambush there) was “the enemy,” a journalist who could not be trusted to manage the image of Team McChrystal like a solid K Street communications firm might.
But there is an item of deeper concern here than just the PR worries of one four-star army general. The remarks of McChrystal’s staff (I really found little objectionable comment in the article from its subject himself) are of people displaying a profound disconnect with those who they serve. We are a nation at war, not just in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also at war with terrorism in general, drugs, in cyberspace and almost anything else important. Despite this, the national politics are viewed by those at the pointy end of the stick as so much silly, trivial posturing.
While military service is not a requisite for executive office, our nation’s soldiers, who deal with life and death and the crushing day-to-day tragedy of counterinsurgency warfare, may see only absurdity in all the politics at home and for good reason. We expect our professional soldiers, who despite nine years of war in Afghanistan remain volunteers, to go into one of the world’s great hinterlands and sort out the problems for us, no matter how complicated.
But this all reminds me of another adaptation to film — the deranged journalist, the far away war at the end of the Earth. It’s all coming into focus. Way up river, ah yes. Is McChrystal just our Kurtz?
Christopher Bronk is the Baker Institute fellow in technology, society and public policy. He previously served as a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State on assignments both overseas and in Washington, D.C.