<em>The Valley of Elah</em> and Homefront Iraq

I attended a private screening the other night of Paul Haggis' The Valley of Elah. To those of us who are Biblically challenged, Elah was the place where David went out with his slingshot to meet the giant Goliath. The point of this adventure, in Haggis' film, is not that the small slew the mighty, but rather the question: what was David feeling? To the main character, an Army-issue veteran and patriot played by Tommy Lee Jones, young David "put away his fear" in order to face the enemy. Tommy Lee Jones' son, who served in Iraq, would have said that David was scared shitless. Here is the disconnect between the politicians, generals and patriots who support the surge and its sequels, and the children who actually fight.

The Iraq movies are coming out, as inexorably as the body count climbs. First to arrive were the excellent documentaries (which few saw -- no doubt they'll be anointed in the award season). And now come the dramatic features, as our most talented filmmakers try to the shape this shapeless catastrophe into art. I doubt any will surpass Valley of Elah. People who are weary of the war's documentary imagery will, upon attending this film, find a fresh and perhaps more devastating view of the war: how it detonates family as surely as any IED.

Tommy Lee Jones searches for answers to his soldier son's death in the U.S. shortly after a tour in Iraq. What he finds seems more frightening for our future than anything in the Mideast. I wonder if any politician who currently balks from shutting down this war has any comprehension of what it's doing to an entire generation of young fighters. They may not be ours, or those of anyone we know, but they are our children nonetheless. Colin Powell warned George W. Bush, "You break it, you own it." We now own, too, our children's nightmare and their deformity.

It will only have been worth it if this was, for our country, the war to end all wars.