Sunny Brooklyn(European Edition): Slippin' Into Darkness

12/7/05

Slippin' Into Darkness

When I interviewed Anthony Swofford (the ex-Marine whose biography was made into the movie"'Jarhead") he talked about this strange nostalgia for the Vietnam War most Desert Storm grunts shared: „In a way the Vietnam War is very romanticized, there’s a somber quality to how it’s considered, because of the many deaths, and, the feeling that it was some kind of a worthless war. But it was a rock ‘n’ roll war, and there were villes outside of every encampment with whores and whiskey, and you were smoking dope, there was heroin, and it was crazy. It was a different kind of lifestyle.“

Contrary to Desert Storm: „Our war was very clean. We were in Saudi Arabia, we couldn’t get alcohol, couldn’t get women—it was almost as though we were being punished for all of the fun that the guys had in Vietnam. Not that the war was fun, but the extra-battlefield stuff, the whores, the drinking, the music. There was no music that came out of the Gulf War. We were listening to Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.“

Things changed. The troops in Iraq might still suffer from a lack of loose women and mind-altering substances, but contrary to their '91 predecessors they sure have their own Pop culture. Troop encampments are way more comfortable then they were in Vietnam now and a lot of grunts have filled their barracks with digital toys of every kind and nature. The flood of blogs and digital photos coming out of Iraq has put a very different spin on the way we view the war. This time it’s not the eyes of the reporters, but of the fighting troops themselves that form our perspective. And they do have their own music now. A frontline solider named Big Neal (pictured) has started the first Baghdad based rap group called 4th25 (as in fourth quarter). They have an album out accompanied by a video clip they assembled from a wide array of taped and shot footage. Some of the original footage plus personal frontline photos can be found on their website gallery, which makes the images from Abu Ghraib look tame.