I seldom stop watching a show I like twenty minutes before the end, but last night’s episode of Numb3rs genuinely called for it. A bible obsessed killer on the loose? Whatever… it’s been done before. And hey, as long as they’re bashing Christians, they’re giving those nice, peaceful Muslims a break, so it’s all good. But 40 minutes into the episode, they had to throw in the former-soldier-abuses-girlfriend meme (and his unit was suspected of rape and abuse but evidently got away with it because, after all, nobody at the Pentagon gives a crap about how soldiers behave as long as they’ve killed their quota of brown people for the week, right?) and the standard anti-war propaganda. It seems like the Hollywood Left (but I repeat myself) has never met a fascist dictator they didn’t like, and never met a soldier they did.
Hey, that’s an hour a week I just got back. I’ll be sure to thank the advertisers for it, too.
I didn’t watch that episode. In fact, I haven’t gotten into Numb3rs. I don’t have anything against it, it’s just that I either really, really watch something or I don’t watch at all.
But as a veteran, I find it extremely rare that Hollywood can portray the military accurately. They don’t understand the discipline or the hardships. I don’t think most Hollywood folks are capable of understanding it. Hardship from their point of view is having someone criticize your work.
Well, put a couple hundred thousand troops in the desert, in a situation in which they never know when they’ll be attacked and how, and you get hardship. And the only way you get the vast majority of them through it is the fact that they have discipline. But the numbers of our troops who go overseas, carry out their duties properly, and then return home without causing any problem isn’t news. The fact that we put people who mess up on trial isn’t news.
You know I oppose the war in Iraq, but those who mix up opposing one set of civilian directives with opposing our military should fear to contemplate what would happen if we had military forces that didn’t carry out the orders of their civilian superiors. (I made some comment here.)