This year, amid the musical tributes and “Band of Brothers” replays that annually commemorate Veterans Day on television, two low-key documentary productions caught my interest. “The Warfighters: Battle Stories” on the History Channel and “In Waves and War” on Netflix are a perfectly mismatched pair: Both focus on American veterans of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, giving similar accounts of battle and recovery, but to different ends. Both honor the troops, but they tell very different stories.
“The Warfighters: Battle Stories” is a two-hour distillation of segments from the History series “The Warfighters,” which ran from 2016 to 2017. Deadly encounters in places like Takur Ghar, in Afghanistan, and Ramadi, Iraq, are recounted by Army Rangers, Green Berets and Navy SEALs who were there. Their interviews — talking heads against a black screen — are accompanied by live footage and extensive recreations, which feel significantly more realistic than the norm; the filmmaker Peter Berg was an executive producer of the series and many veterans worked on its production.
The series, and the film drawn from it, work in the classic manner of military drama, maintaining an artful balance between celebration and sadness. The eventual success of the operations is pretty much a given, and the descriptions of the battles on frigid Afghan hilltops and in sweltering Iraqi cities are terse and vivid. But the stories are not centered on action — in almost every case, they are structured around the deaths or serious wounding of colleagues (and in one case, a dog).
“In Waves and War,” a documentary directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk that had its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, also features intense, firsthand accounts of battle, primarily by three former Navy SEALs: Marcus Capone, Matthew Roberts and D.J. Shipley. The themes of brotherhood and teamwork that are central to “Battle Stories” are taken further here, as we discover the connections among the three SEALs.
“In Waves and War” also features detailed recreations, in this case animated sequences that are of impressive quality for an independent production. They do not depict battle, however. They represent what Capone, Roberts and Shipley have seen while on ibogaine, a hallucinogen they take to treat the crippling effects of post-traumatic stress.
Trauma, which is at the heart of “In Waves and War,” is not glossed over in “Battle Stories,” but a stiff upper lip is a requirement for entry. A Marine who lost both hands says: “I don’t think that I would really change anything. And that includes getting my hands shot off.” A Green Beret who still uses a breathing tube says: “I’d do it all over again. Wouldn’t change a thing.” A SEAL with a taste for grandiose pronouncements talks about having “the will to kill” and being “lucky enough to experience a war.”
Both films note that about 7,100 American service members died in Afghanistan and Iraq. Only “In Waves and War,” however, cites the more sobering statistic that, while those wars were being fought, more than four times as many active service members died by suicide.
Each film is selling something, figuratively and, to a certain extent, literally. “Battle Stories” is pushing heroism and service, in a package with a familiar poetic and mystical sheen; its primary sponsor is USAA, a company that provides banking and insurance mostly to veterans. “In Waves and War” uses similar techniques in its largely uncritical look at the use of psychedelics, which Capone and his wife promote through their VETS foundation.
Sections of “In Waves and War” focus on other veterans who are considering undergoing the treatments that the main characters have already taken, and on a research group at Stanford that is studying the effects of ibogaine. But for most of the film, we are hanging out with the three former SEALs, and they are, on camera at least, good company — smart, thoughtful, funny.
“Battle Stories” allows itself some doubt for a moment. Nate Self, an Army Ranger who won a Silver Star for heroism in Afghanistan, describes the carnage when the helicopter he was aboard crashed. “It’s hard to make sense of that kind of stuff, you know, even years beyond,” he says. The camera lingers on his silent face, in the film’s most eloquent moment.
The SEALs’s stories in “In Waves and War,” told at greater length than “Battle Stories” allows, give us a more intimate sense — if not necessarily a more powerful one — of the horrors and dislocations the troops experienced. The film that has been built around them can be clumsy and disjointed, but it keeps you invested in their progress as it leaves all the war-story conventions behind and follows them on their road trips to the Mexican clinic where they take ibogaine, which is still illegal in the United States.
(Capone and Shipley credit the drug, a psychedelic made from a Central African shrub, with saving their lives, and it has drawn interest as a possible cure for opioid addiction. Its possible side effects include dangerous heart arrhythmias.)
With all their differences, “Battle Stories” and “In Waves and War” are both contradictory and complementary. One starts the story, and the other hopes to finish it.
Mike Hale is a television critic for The Times. He also writes about online video, film and media.
The post Veterans Day TV: Divergent Stories From Forever Wars appeared first on New York Times.
