Men At Work

Writing after the battle of Gettysburg, a Union soldier struggled to relate the curious, unexpected feeling that came over him in the throes of battle. He seemed “full of life” in combat, he claimed, and felt as “vigorous” a feeling as man was capable of experiencing. He, like many soldiers, could not quite articulate this unlikely attraction to the pandemonium and intensity of combat or why, after experiencing the ostensible horrors of battle, he remained in service and even grew to miss it in his old age.

In Shakespeare’s Henry V, a common soldier explains to the disguised Henry that, though his cause may be wrong, his ultimate loyalty is to that of his king and task – being a soldier. Perhaps this is what Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. meant by “the soldier’s faith.” Skill and dedication to one’s work are enough to justify the cause and the losses. For a useful soldier they must be. Yet there is a sense of exhilaration in combat some soldiers insist, despite its brutality, and a spiritual quality and even a strange beauty in the death and destruction reaped by war that doesn’t jive with Tennyson’s passive portrayal of soldiers “doing and dying” rather than “reasoning why.”

In his influential work For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, James M. McPherson cites religion, nationalism, ideology, and community pressure as sources of soldier motivation in chapter length detail. Rarely does he discuss this seductive, non-ideological nature of combat and nowhere does he address technical proficiency or simply “being in the zone” as sources of “sustaining motivation.” Granted McPherson looks primarily at volunteer soldiers, but some historians, it appears, have lost sight of the fact that some common soldiers do what they do, enjoy what they do, and often become captivated by what they do simply because they are good at it.

The recent film The Hurt Locker tells the story of an EOD unit on the front lines in Iraq in 2003. Staff Sgt. William James, portrayed in Oscar-caliber fashion by Jeremy Renner, is a skilled solider, and he knows it. He fights because he feels there is no one else as good at what he does as he is, and he may be right. James defuses an explosive device with the grace and knack of a composer conducting an orchestra. He is surgical. He is an artist. He lives to understand bombs. Yet craftsmanship is often not synonymous with orthodoxy. In one particularly riveting scene (there are many) James acts against protocol and removes his bomb-proof suite in order “If I’m gunna die,” he declares, “I’m gunna die comfortable.” Neither renegade nor conformist, hero nor anti-hero, James represents the skill and steadfastness of the professional soldier. He lacks the ideology that the soldiers in McPherson's display so demonstratively.

As Roger Ebert pointed out in his review of the film:

"The Hurt Locker" is completely apolitical. It has no opinion on the war in
Iraq, except that there is one, and brave men like James and Sanborn are
necessary, and rookies like Eldridge of course are sometimes terrified. In that
sense, "The Hurt Locker" is arguably the most pro-Army feature to emerge from
the war. Pro-Army, not pro-war.”

“War is a drug,” the film's opening quotation insists (penned by New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges) and, without his drug, James becomes discontent upon "rotating back to the world." Cleaning house gutters and grocery shopping pale in comparison to the exhilaration he feels toward his craft. It is at this point where the film speaks to elements of a topic Civil War historian Eric T. Dean has dealt with quite well: post-traumatic stress disorder. In the case of Sgt. James, some form of the disorder manifests in his inability to readjust back to civilian life and, for the lack of a better term, combat addiction. Yet the drug-like quality of battle – an emotional high all but unachievable in civilian life – does not seduce him any more than he is the master of it. He both acts and is acted upon.

The film’s title is also a colloquial expression for a place of pain. Every time James dismantles a bomb, he keeps a small element of it as a souvenir to remind him of the acumen of his opponents and how close he came to death. He stores these shells, fuses, and wires – things that almost or should have killed him – in a container beneath his bed and revisits them with regularity. This is his hurt locker. This is his war. This is his place of pain. Like all soldiers, James must balance being in a constant state of being aware of danger and simultaneously working to surmount it. He just happens to do it better than some. And therein lies the film’s essence: no ideological speeches, no subtle political commentary, no jingoistic diatribes or waxing poetic on the causes and consequences of the war. These are men at work.