Platner, Charging American Soldiers Are ‘Sent To Die,’ Advances Hollywood’s Nihilistic View of Military Service

Maine’s Democratic Senate candidate, Graham Platner, is raising the specter of America’s young people being “sent to die” in wars. It’s a depiction that equates military service with a death sentence — a depiction that hurts morale and recruitment while striking a posture of weakness before America’s enemies.It’s not my purpose here to belittle the tragedy of American fatalities in any war, including the current one. It is, rather, to decry the cynicism of the Democrats and to defend attempts to blame Senator Susan Collins and others blame our war deaths on anyone but our enemies. The topic emerged when Mr. Platner told the New York Times that after 9/11 the Republican he seeks to unseat, Ms. Collins, had “voted to send me to Iraq.” On Thursday, the senator told reporters that Mr. Platner“was not drafted” but, rather, that it “was Platner’s decision to serve.”Mr. Platner responded on X that “every single one of the 7,000 young men and women Susan Collins sent to die in Iraq and Afghanistan enlisted.” The future Senate hopeful himself signed up in 2003, months after combat began in Iraq, where he served three tours.Ms. Collins’s remark was, Mr. Platner said, “a disgusting slap in the face” to the families of those who died “and a callous disregard for their sacrifice.” The victim framing resurfaces a premise born out of the Vietnam War — and of endless movies portraying the conflict as a misadventure in which young lives were thrown away by a callous government.In 2007, the New Republic published “the Baghdad Diaries,” Scott Beauchamp’s allegations of Iraq War atrocities. “That’s not Iraq,” a Wall Street Journal columnist, Peggy Noonan, recalled thinking of the events described. “That’s a Vietnam War movie.” Mr. Beauchamp’s story was retracted when its claims couldn’t be substantiated.Ms. Noonan observed that tall tales about Iraq rang true because they reflected “the dark world of Kubrick and Coppola and Oliver Stone … This is the off-hand brutality of war. You know. You saw it in a movie.” In 2004, Jesse Macbeth spent six weeks detailing similar war crimes for the press before being exposed as a fraud who never served.Films, of course, are dramatizations, and anti-war ones cast events in the worst light possible. As a member of the British Parliament in 1934, Winston Churchill warned that instilling a negative view of combat experiences was just as bad as teaching bloodthirsty militarism.“Many people think,” Churchill said, “that the best way to escape war is to dwell upon its horrors and to imprint them vividly upon the minds of the younger generation. They flaunt the grisly photograph before their eyes. They fill their ears with tales of carnage.”“But how,” Churchill asked, “would it help us if we were attacked or invaded ourselves? That is the question we have to ask.” It’s one Germans are confronting now as they try to expand their military. A Forsa poll in August found that only 16 percent would “definitely” fight for their country. Students have led three walkouts this year to protest conscription and being “cannon fodder.”Opponents of military action are raising the threat of an American draft for Iran as they have for all post-Vietnam conflicts. In 2006, Senator John Kerry spoke as if conscription hadn’t been ended by President Nixon in 1973 and advised college students to “do well” in their studies. “If you don’t,” he said, “you get stuck in Iraq.”What an obnoxious thing to say. The remark’s Vietnam-era premise — dropouts lost their college draft deferments — was long gone by 2006, making it an insult of those who volunteered for military service. Like Mr. Platner, Mr. Kerry’s thinking reflected the Hollywood vision of warfare. Faced with withering criticism, he said he’d made a “botched joke.”The broad American public treasures its men and women in uniform; so painting opponents as holding their lives cheap is effective politics. Yet while losing lives is always a possibility in combat, it’s never the goal — of Ms. Collins or anyone else in Washington who faces those weighty decisions of war and peace.

Platner, Charging American Soldiers Are ‘Sent To Die,’ Advances Hollywood’s Nihilistic View of Military Service

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