Mitch and Katie and I saw a film a few weeks ago called Winter Soldiers, made in 1972. It was a typically atypical discovery of Mitch's because it was screened with a DVD player and a home projector kit at this place in Roger's Park called Mess Hall, a self-described socialist(?) "cultural center" tucked into a storefront beneath the Red Line. Usually Mitch learns of these events because a homeless man gives him a good tip or because he literally wanders into them, but this time he caught wind of it thanks to Flavorpill which, as Mitch says, "tells you all the stuff you only hear about after it's over and wish you would've gone." Earlier this month Flavorpill took us to the Chicago Cultural Center to watch a screening of old home movies (from the 1930's-1970's) that their owners volunteered to show.

Anyway, I drove us to Mess Hall, a trip that would be better to forget (Katie listened to ten minutes of 'Let's just park first and walk there,' versus 'I'd rather find it first and then look for parking,' it was finally revealed that Mitch did not, in fact, have the address of the place). The film, Winter Soldiers is a documentary, really a straight-up telecast, of the Winter Soldier Investigation, a conference held in 1972 by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, for which honorably discharged soldiers sat on a panel and gave harrowing testimonies of the war crimes they witnessed and/or committed during their tenure in Vietnam. In short, it's one of the most emotional, confusing, stirring films I've ever seen. I never knew that a spoken testimony could be so violent...I thought I was fairly desensitized to that, but the words of those veterans are sometimes hard to listen to. For the men who talk about what they've seen, the act of recollection and verbalization is itself an emotional violence...many never spoke about or even considered what they'd seen until they got up on the panel, and the raw experience of discovering their personal trauma is painfully captured by the camera.

On the way back home, I thought about how, as hard as a movie like that is to take, the benefit of it is, living in 2006, you can enjoy almost perfect moral clarity with regard to the Vietnam war. That's a luxury I can't comprehend with the war in Iraq. I told Mitch and Katie that I just couldn't muster any amount of passion or indignance against this war, not even enough to articulate my support for or against it. Intellectually the ideology and pragmatics behind it is a clusterfuck, but the million-dollar question at the top right now is, is it better to leave a country in civil war or stay in and make a futile effort to stabilize it? And I can't see myself waving a flag for either of those strategies. Then we talked about torture and how much torture do you think Americans are engaged in right now versus how much was committed in Vietnam toward the Vietcong and civilians alike, and how, despite Abu Ghraib, it seemed like a very isolated phenomenon. And Mitch and Katie disagreed with that, and I said that if there were more soldiers who came back and testified like the VAW's, then I could get myself riled against it, but then someone asked me how many cases of torture I'd need to learn about before I could be against the war, and that confused me. It reminded me of my English 101 teacher who pointed out that the Bush administration releases these reports of its torture cases little by little so that the public becomes in a way desensitized to it, and I thought just now whether I was just desensitized by news from Iraq or just disconnected from it.

Anyhow, I think this film, it's called Winter Soldiers is out on DVD, so you too might get the chance to see it and shove a cheese grater in your head.

I should add an addendum, which is I saw my girlfriend cut up a bunny rabbit last week in her heart disease research lab, which was cool but ultimately disgusting, and proof that in this modern world, nobody is really desensitized to mutilating bunny rabbits. Except for Kristen, because it's her job.