'Warfare' teaches men how to lose
Plus some brief words on my whole deal and Substack Blowing Up Right Now
Hello, readers new and old! Quite a few new readers have subscribed to this newsletter, in fact, and thus it behooves me to offer some introductory remarks.
My name is Adam Fleming Petty, and I’m a writer living in beautiful West Michigan. I’ve written for The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Commonweal, Gawker, and many other venues. Here at my newsletter, Very Distant Lands1, I cover books, movies, TV, occasionally music, the Midwest, often while considering the role that religion and belief, of any and all sorts, play in all those fields. I write 4-6 entries a month on those topics, with some content behind a paywall.
Based on what the boys in the VDL Analytics Department have told me, the spike in new subscribers can be traced to two sources. Last week, I wrote about two new novels from Substack luminaries Ross Barkan and John Pistelli, both of whom linked to it in their own, more widely-read newsletters. Certain intrepid readers clicked through to my own little corner of the internet, and here we are. The ecosystem at work!
And fortuitously, even remarkably so, last week also saw the books and literature circle of Substack get some major coverage. As you likely heard, Naomi Kanakia of the Woman of Letters newsletter was featured in the freakin’ New Yorker! Peter Baker, who writes his own newsletter, wrote there about Kanakia’s novella “Money Matters,” published as a single 15K word entry. “Is the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack?”asks the headline. Baker writes:
The experience felt a little like getting unexpectedly absorbed in a trashy episode of reality TV, but also like suddenly realizing that a conversation that started in the shallows of small talk has at some point drifted into the deep waters of meaning. I reached the end in a happily disoriented daze. No other piece of new fiction I read last year gave me a bigger jolt of readerly delight.
Much deserved praise, and from the august home of Eustace Tilley no less! “Money Matters” is something interesting, as Kanakia makes use of the newsletter format to craft a chatty-yet-scrutinizing authorial voice that really does stand out in the current literary landscape. She’s also made herself into something like the Gertrude Stein of Substack, forming a circle of writers and readers around her. She boosts their work, they reach more new readers, and Substack gets a little more lively.
That includes me—Naomi recommends my newsletter on her page, and several of the many new readers who subscribed to Woman of Letters following the New Yorker boost clicked on through to my newsletter as well. I’m grateful to those new readers for giving me a look!
I’m even more grateful to Naomi herself, who’s been very generous and supportive to me over the past year or so. That generosity emerges from a deeply principled place, as she lays out in this entry. Talent is far more abundant than is often thought, and for right now, Substack offers a space for new writers to find new readers. And it’s funny, I’m hardly a new writer, as I’ve been publishing work in one form or another for more than a decade now2, yet I still mostly fly under the radar, sending out missives from my basement compound stacked with bottled water and unpublished manuscripts. That’s partly why I’ve been putting my energy into Substack: it offers a chance for writers to level up, reach a wider readership, and I am trying to take my bite at that apple. And that sense of opportunity owes something real to Naomi.
Speaking of which! I’ll soon toss my hat into the fiction-writing ring. This summer, I am going to serialize a novella here at VDL. It’s called The Unauthorized Guide to MindShifter, and it’s about lost TV episodes, toxic fans, teenage girl rivalries, young woman frenemies, national tragedies, and regional fast food franchises. Looking forward to sharing it with you!
This week, though, let’s get emotional about war movies.
When I graduated from high school in 2000, I had no plans for what to do next. Other friends were going off to college, one of them even was going to become an engineer and thus plan out for the following few decades of their life. Yet I resisted that sense of planning, of plotting, of organizing. I distrusted it then. I still do now, kinda. Any wonder I’m an obscure writer on Substack?
Back in the spring of 2000, I would eventually get a job at a grocery store3 and work there for a year before, in fact, going to college. During that shaky interregnum, though, I placed a tentative toe on a few other paths. One of them was the military.
This was not unthinkable. Both my parents served in the military—mother Air Force, father Army. That’s where they met, in fact. And this was spring of 2000, pre-9/11, so the military didn’t hold the risk of getting shipped off to some forever war. So I figured, why not check it out, see what’s what.
In the Indiana town where I grew up, the Army Recruitment Center is right next to the Walmart. (That’s a whole Midwestern novel right there.) I stopped there with my dad one day. I sat down at a desk with a recruiter, who looked more like a tech support guy. My dad spoke on my behalf, saying we were here just to ask some questions. The recruiter, though, had a question of his own.
“What’s wrong with your eye?”
Since the age of 10, I have had diplopia—double vision, permanently. The feed from each of my eyes does not cohere in my brain, and so I see the world as two overlapping images, like some artsy darkroom effect. This is manageable. I can easily focus on one eye, usually the left, while the other eye crosses inwardly. I can switch focus, too, making my eyes goggle in my head like a shaken doll.
But this did not pass muster with the military. Once I stammered out an answer, the recruiter didn’t hesitate. I couldn’t pass the health screening. No way I could shoot a rifle with my eyesight. I would have no future in the military.
Which, obviously. Me, in the military? Yet it still pained me. Not that I wanted to become a soldier. Rather, it was among the first instances of a feeling I would come to know more and more as I grew older. The feeling of realizing, suddenly, that my available paths in life were narrower than I had assumed.
So when 9/11 happened a year later, and the invasion of Iraq a year and a half after that, I was filled with ambivalence. I was against the war, sure. Yet I also felt untested. As if the life I never had—could never have lived—in the military was one where I could have achieved some measure of certainty about who I am, and who I am not. But unable to enlist, without even the option to do so, that untestedness remained.
This led to an abiding interest in war stories. Books, films. Apocalypse Now. Dispatches. Jarhead. Meditations in Green. I would go on to write not one, but two full-length novels about the Iraq War. The first got me into the Tin House Writers Workshop almost a decade ago. That manuscript now lingers in a box in the basement. The second, a private eye noir, is one I’m currently shopping around. Stories of men in theaters of war told me something about myself, or rather, something I wasn’t. A path that had never been open to me.
So of course I went to see Warfare in theaters. I am a connoisseur of the Forever War film genre, which requires patience, as many of these films aren’t that great. Back in 2008, A.S. Hamrah, perpetually cranky film critic for n+1, suffered through like two dozen of those and detailed the ordeal. The following years have seen some better efforts. The Guest is a taut thriller; Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant4 is way better than it has to be; oh and The Hurt Locker won the Oscar for Best Picture even though no one talks about it now and it’s just alright?
Warfare is different than those movies. It is touted as ultra-real, to the point of documentary. Co-written and even co-directed by Alex Garland, the mind behind Civil War and Ex Machina, and Ray Mendoza, a military veteran who served as a consultant on Civil War, the film is a cinema verite portrayal of a single, discrete conflict that took place in Ramadi in 2006. A platoon of Navy SEALs, including Mendoza himself, were trapped in a house and besieged by vaguely defined insurgents. Ramadi has been covered extensively in the voluminous journalism produced in response to the Iraq War—Thomas Ricks’ Fiasco is probably the most detailed account—yet Warfare takes pains to note that the only source the film consults is the memories of the soldiers portrayed therein. During the credits, we even see photos taken at the site of the siege. Cinema verite indeed.
Nor is this some Dirty Dozen-style trek onward to some sort of victory. These soldiers fail. They lose. They are given a mission, and they fail at it, and then they retreat.
The mission: the SEALs, under cover of night, bivouac themselves in a home in a neighborhood.5 They are there to gather in intelligence on one of the dozens, even hundreds, of rebel groups cropping up across Iraq, seeking to gain power for their own ends. They hide in the house, believing themselves very slick. But they are discovered almost immediately.
Gunshots ring out as the neighborhood opens fire on the SEALs. They return fire. They attempt to escape on a tank, but fail. They hole up in the house and tend their wounds. Another platoon arrives, and another tank, and this time they escape. They retreat. They make it out, and the movie ends.
More than any other war movie, Warfare recalls Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan’s WWII film about the British soldiers attempting to cross the English Channel from France back to home. A story of retreat. A story that would go on to become a shining moment ensconced in British history, hailed as a masterstroke of tactics. Schoolchildren learn about it. Picture little Christopher Nolan in a schoolboy uniform, sketching fighter planes in the back of his primer.
Yet the story that Warfare tells is one that is almost completely unknown by the wider public. Schoolchildren don’t learn about them. The memory of Ramadi isn’t toasted at dive bars. Which is too bad, really, since the lesson that Warfare tries to teach is a needed one.
How to lose. How to retreat. How to admit defeat. And in doing so, retain, or even protect, some measure of honor.
A necessary lesson, even for a cross-eyed scribbler like me. Especially me, perhaps. And perhaps you too.
Yes, the name comes from Adventure Time. One of my first posts was about the show and I just chose the name cause I liked the sound of it? And still do? Mathematical, as Finn the Human would say.
I wrote for The Millions way back when C. Max Magee was the editor, for crying out loud.
And I now work at another grocery store today—full circle. We live out our adolescence once, and then relive it, again and again, for the rest of our lives.
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, who has inadvertently become the definitive actor portraying the experience of the American soldier in the Forever Wars. The aforementioned Jarhead; Brothers; even Detective Loki in Prisoners is a veteran, stealthily so.
“No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.”
—The Third Amendment of the Bill of Rights