Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our names, been saying it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, Scott Horton Show.
Introducing Miles Lugosi.
He is one of the cameramen and director of the new movie, which may be out in your town, Combat Obscura, about US Marines during the Afghan surge in 2011 and 12 in the Helmand province.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Great.
Thanks for having me.
Really happy to have you here.
Really appreciate you making the time to talk to us here.
So do I have this right?
1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment there in Helmand province.
Is that right?
Yep.
Okay.
And then the project itself, I understand it started as an official Marine Corps project.
They gave you these cameras to make PR for them essentially, but you guys just kept filming and kept the footage.
That's pretty much it.
Yeah.
Our job was basically to film the hearts and minds aspect of the war and show how we were.
At that point, we were transitioning out of Afghanistan.
That was seven years ago.
We were supposed to film hearts and minds, working with the Afghan army, stuff like that.
But at the same time, we were filming everything else that was happening as well.
I promise I really want to talk about the war and the film with you, but just to get this out of the way here, there was a bit of a controversy about you guys putting this film out, right?
I think I read in Task and Purpose that did they succeed in delaying the release of the film, something like that?
Well, it was mostly just a long back and forth with the Marine Corps.
I'd gotten the footage declassified by the Pentagon and reviewed by the Pentagon, but the Marine Corps was upset because they were claiming that they owned the footage.
They were obviously upset about the portrayal of the Marines and just the war in general, I guess.
Yeah.
Now, it's funny because when it comes to that, I guess, supposedly, what are the big negative portrayals that they thought they didn't want people to see?
Obviously, smoking pot was part of it.
What else?
Yeah, I mean, smoking pot was kind of the big one.
I think it was also, I mean, it's just the general lack of narrative that is in the film that kind of thrust viewers into this sort of inside perspective that you don't normally get.
And what you see, I mean, being a Marine with a camera, you see how they act when they're just around each other and the way that they deal with death and this sort of military gallows humor, I guess, that they'd rather not be portrayed.
I think they'd rather people think that the Marine Corps is like a bunch of Boy Scouts who are like, you know, super well trained and, you know, conducting themselves always appropriately, et cetera, et cetera.
And then, so talk a little bit about the choice that you made to not narrate or describe or anything.
You kind of drop us in the middle of a Helmand province.
I sort of get the feeling, I mean, was that deliberate?
So that we sort of feel like you guys felt no one was narrating for you either.
It's sort of like, here's your new camp and you don't know what's going on, who's who either, right?
Yeah, I mean, that was a really important part because I feel like even with documentaries, if you're given a sort of narrative, it's always constructed in hindsight.
When we were out there, we didn't really know what we were doing.
We didn't fully know the scale of the operation, what the long-term goal was.
It's basically, you're just out there walking around waiting to get shot at and then trying to figure out who's shooting at you and returning fire.
That's basically, that's how we wanted the viewer to experience the film as well.
I think there's a lot of emotional uncertainty as well that we wanted to come across.
Yeah, you had an interview with one Marine complaining about how he hasn't seen the enemy yet.
All they do is they set these landmines.
So you're out there playing the IED lottery essentially, but there's no one to...
It'd feel a lot better if he could get in a firefight and have his say in the engagement instead of just being targeted by ghosts kind of thing.
I could see how that would be frustrating.
Yeah, and that scene comes right after where there's another guy.
I get hit by shrapnel and I'm like, oh, I don't want any more combat.
Oh, that is you.
I'm sorry, I did not make that connection.
I'm looking right at you on Skype right now, but I get it now.
Okay, I'm sorry.
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to recognize a lot of people.
We were much younger then and we're wearing full gear and stuff.
But we wanted to show the sort of paradoxical nature of war.
How these two conflicting ideas can coexist at the same time and how that sort of helps you function, I guess, in an extreme environment like that.
Okay, so you mentioned that this is a time when you guys are kind of drawing down at the end of the surge.
You had been there for how long before y'all got these cameras?
Were you there in the escalation of the surge in Helmand?
No, I was my first appointment in 2011.
I was in Japan before that, but I think the surge started around 2008.
Well, I mean, the big surge in Afghanistan started really at the beginning of 2010 and 2011 were the two biggest years of it, right?
Well, no, I think they started really damping it up around 2008.
They didn't start pushing large troops there yet, but they were trying to get more recruits into the military around 2008.
That's when I was enlisted.
Yeah, but I think that you're right.
Our operation in 2011 was supposed to be the kind of last hurrah of operations in Afghanistan before handing it over to the Afghan army.
Obviously, that didn't really work out very well.
It seems like y'all mostly were staying put at the base, right?
Were you out there seeking destroyed patrols?
What exactly was your mission there?
Dude, like I said, we set up.
Basically, they drop you in.
You take over an Afghan's house.
You go into an Afghan mud hut where these families live and you pay them to leave.
Then you take over their house and you turn it into a patrol base.
From there, you, like I said, conduct counterinsurgency, which basically means walking around, waiting to get shot at, and then trying to figure out who's shooting back.
In the middle of all that, you are supposed to be winning the hearts and minds of the locals and getting them on your side so that they can, quote unquote, fight against the Taliban themselves without our help, etc.
Yeah.
Was that working at all?
I mean, I'm sorry.
I don't mean to just be facetious about that.
No, it didn't work, obviously, because, you know, if you're an Afghan in a tribal region like Helmand and you're seeing these foreign occupiers come in who you can't even see their face because we're wearing so much gear and also eye protection, so sunglasses, so you can't even really see our faces.
And we're basically like an alien race to them, you know, or like some kind of robot enigma or something.
It's just such a cultural barrier.
So who are you going to trust?
One oppressive regime or the other.
So the Taliban actually speaks their language and, you know, they know them a little better.
They've been there longer.
They're oppressive, of course, but in a lot of ways, they get shit done for the locals.
I'm not trying to glorify the Taliban, but a lot of times they're the law and order for those regions that are ungoverned, that the government doesn't really have any kind of reach towards.
They sort of act as a makeshift government, like law enforcement, you know, if something bad happens, they enact crime and punishment sort of stuff, although very brutally, but, you know, it's something, I guess.
Sure.
That's always been the Taliban's way, right?
Law and order, and it's seriously authoritarian, but it's not just, you know, the worst kind of corruption, highwaymen sort of criminality that you find from other Afghan warlords, right?
Where they're just kidnapping and raping and stealing.
Yeah, I don't look at the Taliban as like ISIS or Al-Qaeda.
But, you know, I don't have very much experience with the Taliban.
We never really saw, you know, we never saw them shooting at us.
You never did?
I never did.
No, I know guys that had seen someone shooting at them, like physically seeing someone shooting, but I never saw anyone.
You just hear the bullets and, you know, you get down and try to return fire.
And were you guys involved in training the ANA as well?
We weren't specifically.
We were just patrolling with them and working with them.
The training mostly comes from like special forces guys, US special forces.
And, you know, the Afghan army itself trains them the best they can.
But yeah, we were just mostly living with them and working with them.
And, you know, there was some tension between the two because a lot of the Afghan army has been known to, you know, switch sides and start working for the Taliban.
So there's tension there.
But, you know, you see scenes of us like smoking hash together and stuff like that.
So there were moments of bonding and stuff as well.
But so for you guys, you never had any of them shoot you in the back or this kind of thing that green on blue attacks, insider attacks?
No, that would make like, whenever that happens, it makes headline news.
You know, it's not never happened with us.
Yeah, it sure does happen pretty regularly.
But in fact, I was just reading a thing, I guess, a year ago now about Marines back in Helmand and how they have what they call their guardian angels, who is the sniper on the tower, whose job it is to keep a scope on the men being trained in order to protect the Marines training them.
And that there's that level of distrust all day long, you know?
Yeah, I mean, it was unfortunate, like even with the translators we were working with who are not armed.
There was still, I mean, these Afghan locals that were working for the U.S. forces to help translate with locals and stuff.
Even there, there was a lot of distrust, you know?
So yeah, it was obviously a very fraught situation that you just kind of did the best you could.
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Listen, I got to tell you, you know, I'm really interested in foreign policy.
I spent a lot of time on this stuff and I'm subject to a lot of propaganda from a lot of different angles.
And one of the things I really appreciated about this film is it's been a long time, I guess, since I saw some footage where you really get to meet some Marines.
You really get to see actual, you know, people under that uniform.
Like you said, the glasses, the gear, everything kind of makes it takes the individuality away from the men, makes them almost robots wearing the eyes of the Taliban.
I understand what you mean about that.
But it's also the same for us Americans at home.
And all we ever see is a view of like the backs of soldiers or maybe the side of a Marine, like a profile of a Marine shooting.
But you never get to see what he's shooting at.
And usually it's just B-roll footage.
Someone's talking over it, right?
They never show us like, hey, here's the footage that Miles shot.
Here's a solid 10 minutes on CNN of what it's like to be a Marine in Helmand for a little while.
And here's Bobby and here's Joey and here's Mark.
And here's the group that's going out here today.
We don't get to see the humanization.
If anything, you guys are built up as being sort of these superhuman idols that are sort of dehumanized in the other direction, right?
Or we don't get to see as just a guy in a helmet risking his life out there and not sure why.
So that part is so important to me.
It's nothing that you say, right?
It's the ability to see you all just being yourselves out there for a minute in a row, you know?
Yeah, I mean, to me, that's the best way to humanize an institution or a group of people, particularly the military, is just by showing how young these guys are and their flaws and the mistakes that they make.
And their silliness when they're goofing around.
Yeah, and these are kids, you gotta understand, these are kids you went to high school with who didn't want to go to college but wanted to go to war.
I mean, people seem to kind of miss that in the whole sanitized perspective of the military.
Whereas, you gotta understand, these are kids, I wanted to go to war.
I wanted to film war.
These are kids that wanted to go to war when they were 18.
Their brains hadn't fully developed yet, you know?
But these are the kids you grew up with.
And we, yeah, I think that's the ultimate way to humanize them is to show the kind of parts that you might not be very comfortable with acknowledging, you know?
Yeah.
Well, and I guess, so tell me, in your experience, the whole want to go to war thing, how much of that is dependent upon the view that your government wouldn't send you anywhere where it wasn't okay?
Versus, I don't really care who they tell me to kill, I just want to have some fun, kind of more mercenary attitude.
I don't think it's about having fun, necessarily.
I honestly think it's about self-identity, you know?
And when you're 18, and you're trying to figure out who you are, and you want to challenge yourself, and you want to push yourself, and you want to discover what you're made of.
And in America, especially, I think the aesthetics of war and the way that we look at war is such that we place a huge amount of moral authority about going through combat, and coming out the other side, and seeing beyond the scope of normal life.
And for an 18-year-old, I think that is an extremely seductive myth about war.
That you're going to learn something, and you're going to come out a different person.
So, yeah, it's not so much like a psychotic, like, I just want to go kill people and have fun doing it.
It's more about testing yourself, I think.
Which is also a very dangerous way of looking at war.
But it's a very American-centric viewpoint, I think.
Well, and I think you're right in the way that you answered it, where which battlefield you're in kind of isn't even part of the question at all.
Who it is that you're up against is essentially completely besides the point.
It almost goes without saying the premise that whatever it is that you're being sent to do is okay, or you wouldn't be sent to do it, and so it's almost not even a question.
There is that layer of it where, I mean, it's weird because it's sort of like a cognitive dissonance, because I think a lot of Americans are skeptical of the wars that we're fighting.
But at the same time, we sort of, we're comfortable with them going on in the background.
And I think a lot of Americans secretly feel safer because they are.
At this point, they've been going on, like, Afghanistan has been going on for so long that it's so normalized.
And I think a lot of Americans have somehow compartmentalized it into a way where they feel safer that it keeps going.
I don't know.
That's just the impression that I get sometimes.
Of course.
Yeah, no question.
And also what you say, too, about every single one of us in this society is brought up to believe that this is essentially, joining the military is the ultimate case of how a boy becomes a man.
This is the ultimate camping trip, the ultimate physical and mental challenge.
And in all the commercials my whole life, of course, that's what happens, right?
They show over and over again.
Young kid leaving high school, leaves home.
He comes home.
He's a full grown man who looks his dad in the eye and gives him a good strong handshake.
And now he's a real adult because he's been to war and back, or at least been to boot camp and back, this kind of thing.
Yeah, but those commercials don't recruit people like anti-war movies recruit the most kids like Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, Platoon.
Those were the movies that we grew up with and they don't glorify war at all.
In fact, they're very critical and they show the barbarity of it and everything and the senselessness of it, but it still has the reverse effect on kids because I think, like you said, it promotes that idea, the grandiose, like the horror, like the Apocalypse Now, the horror, the horror, the unfathomableness of war as a seductive kind of thing.
And I think we've even sort of, in our culture especially, I think we've glorified trauma almost.
The image of the traumatized veteran is such a trope in our society.
And it's sort of, it in itself has its own appeal.
I don't want to sound too controversial, but the way that we kind of reify trauma, I think, is a little problematic.
Sure.
Well, it's just in the most general sense, it's exciting.
It's important.
A war is never nothing.
A war is something huge.
It's something to be a part of.
It's something to, you know, as part of this movie, right?
You have this brotherhood with these other Marines that you never knew before but who now will be your lifelong friends because of what y'all went through together at such an extreme level of intensity, right?
Yeah, and this is how we're able to, all of this is how we're able to have an all-volunteer military.
Like, you understand that, right?
I mean, these notions perpetuate the military-industrial complex.
It's not, you know, we didn't get drafted.
It's all volunteer.
And it's almost like the greatest social experiment slash scam in civilization, you know, is the military.
It's this kind of, like you said, bonding experience, et cetera.
And again, all very self-important, and the Afghans are sort of like extras in our movies here.
This is sort of the theater where our little melodrama is taking place.
Oh yeah, it's always the American perspective.
I mean, my movie's no different.
Well, you're you and you filmed it, so there's no way around that.
Yeah, but we hope to kind of show some of the Afghan perspective and the destructive effects that this culture, this military culture has on the locals and stuff.
Obviously, I couldn't film, you know, strictly from the Afghan perspective.
Like, I couldn't go up and be interviewing Afghans and stuff, but, you know.
Well, but you do show some very important scenes, some examples.
You want to talk about the humiliation of the bald man being held at gunpoint in the field there?
Yeah, like we, so they thought he was a suicide bomber.
Because he had, I guess he had been walking next to us.
And this was the day after we had gotten pretty heavily mortared.
And so everyone was kind of on edge.
And yeah, you just treat everyone as a potential enemy because you don't know who the enemy is.
And there's a huge distrust there.
And you, yeah, you don't really look at them as completely human.
You know, there's a huge dehumanization process.
Just from being there and being, having to potentially kill, you know, these people.
So.
Yeah.
Pretty hard to win their hearts and minds when you're not sure who's your enemy and who's not.
And you're supposed to pat somebody on the head one minute and shoot them in the head the next.
Yeah.
A tough situation to be in there for sure.
So, can you tell us a little bit about the, there's, I guess, one search for a high value target, particularly portrayed in the film, but obviously there's more like that.
Can you talk about what that's like?
You know, looking for, we're trying to find this one guy who we think that's going to make a difference.
Or our commanders are telling us this is going to make a difference if we can go and hunt this one guy down.
And what that's like for you guys and for the Afghans whose homes you're in and this kind of thing?
Yeah, it's like, I mean, people don't realize that was like an intelligence call.
Like, Intel called in and said, you know, we just saw a guy go into this compound.
He's a high value target, yada, yada.
So, they were looking from a drone or something.
They were up in the sky and they saw it.
And so, they don't really, they're not really sure because they're, you know, hundreds of feet up in the air and they're in some desk somewhere and they don't really know what's going on.
But then you tell that to the guys in the ground.
And so, we're thinking, okay, we're about to be like face to face with the enemy in this house.
They're saying they're in this house and we're going to catch them by surprise.
And we're going to be like face to face with the Taliban in a few minutes.
So, your adrenaline's going crazy.
And so, you have that kind of skewed vantage points.
There's two skewed, there's two problematic vantage points.
One is in the sky and one is on the ground.
And it's sort of, this is like a metaphor for the whole war and the war on terror in general, I think.
Just this, the amount of technology and power and force that goes into it and still coming up empty and getting it wrong, you know.
And it's just, it's never reported how often intelligence is wrong.
You know, just false, just straight up wrong.
And so, that's kind of what happened in this situation.
We went to this house and we thought there were bad guys there.
There weren't any.
They just seemed, they were having a funeral.
And you could see the looks on their faces as just like, you know, total, you know, just total frustration and just like humiliation, like you said.
And just kind of resentment.
That they were feeling.
And yeah, that's kind of how it played out.
After a while, we left and, you know, let them go about their evening, so.
Yeah.
And this kind of stuff would happen a lot.
I think about too, shoe on the other foot where, you know, somebody interrupts your dinner, that's one thing.
Somebody interrupts a funeral?
Like that's probably, if you're at a funeral, it's probably someone that you cared a lot about.
And now they're dead and you're pretty upset.
And now you got foreign troops marching up and interrogating everybody in the middle of something like that.
I mean, how's somebody supposed to forget that?
Yeah, I know.
It makes you question if we are creating more enemies just by our involvement in some of these, you know, conflicts.
For sure.
So, you know, I don't know how much across the line this is.
It's in the movie.
You want to talk about your friends and comrades in your group that got killed?
Yeah, I mean, you see one at the end, Jacob Levy.
He got shot in the head.
It was tough to, it was a tough decision to include that footage and show it, you know.
The decision came after I'd gotten permission from his mom and everything.
But we wanted to, it's one of the longest sequences in the film.
And we kind of wanted to show, deconstruct the whole aesthetic of combat as this sort of Hollywood game where it's like you see the enemy, the guy gets shot, you get a medevac.
That doesn't happen in this case.
The helicopter keeps coming down and taking off again because they were under fire.
And so you're just kind of holding this guy who's losing blood.
And, you know, you can see there are guys there that I could see like the physical signs of trauma, like setting in in real time.
You know, like a couple, like one of them had a twitch afterwards that you can see developing in that moment.
And yeah, I just kind of, you know, the physical affect of it was the physical labor of combat, you know, the heaviness of it and just the weight and the sound and everything.
And to show that in a really unedited fashion or, you know, clipped.
So, yeah, that was, you know, one of many that died on that deployment.
Yeah.
And, you know, like you said, it's kind of a fine line, right?
Where that can be self-reinforcing that like, wow, look at what these guys went through and it can't be for nothing.
We can't let it be in vain.
We got to stick through to the end and sacrifice however many thousand more and never give up and never give in.
And the, as you said, the heaviness of it that you survived and what a hero that makes you, you know, in the common conception then helps propel this mission and the next one to forward.
And it's hard.
I know in your film, you're really trying to get across, I think, certainly what I picked up confirms my bias anyway, but that if you're going to ask these guys to die and risk their lives to do these things, it should only be when it's absolutely necessary and not when it's not.
That you can't let these guys get killed for nothing.
If they're going to get killed, it's got to be literally, not figuratively, to fight for our freedom and to protect us.
Otherwise, what is it for, right?
I think that's what the movie's saying, but like you're saying, it could almost be taken the other way where the Hawks just go, wow, what a bunch of brave guys.
We're going to sign up your son too, you know?
Yeah, that's definitely not the message we want to get across.
There is a futility to it that we want to show.
It's interesting because the left and the right tend to pigeonhole it into their own kind of thing.
Like you said, the right looks at it as this heroic, sacrificial thing, and then the left tends to victimize them, like, oh, what a waste.
But we do, we want to show a kind of general, almost like, what do you call it, when people speak at a funeral?
Is that called a eulogy?
Yeah.
Like the movie's sort of, I guess, a eulogy for America's longest war.
It's supposed to be like a poem, sort of, I guess.
Man, well, you should have pulled that off.
I'll tell you.
I don't know if, you know, my guy was talking to your guy and whatever to arrange this thing, so I don't know if you know, but I wrote a book about the war in Afghanistan.
And I'm happy to send you one.
I hope I can get your address after this thing and send you a copy if you're interested in it.
But, you know, I think you, knowing what I know about the thing, I think you certainly achieved what you were going for there.
And I like to think, too, it's sort of implied in what you said, that the war has got to end now and we can't go on like this.
You can't give a eulogy for a war that's going to last another 10 years.
Yeah, right.
I mean, they're finally doing peace talks.
We'll see where that goes.
I don't have a huge, you know, I'm not a huge, I don't think this is going to solve everything.
But I have some skepticism, but we'll see.
You know, something has to change, at least, you know, can't keep going like this.
Yeah.
Well, you're right.
We're right in the middle of some talks.
They're certainly the most productive that have happened this entire time.
No question about that.
So I think a real reason to be, you know, hopeful, if not optimistic, something like that.
Yeah.
Anyway, hey, man, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show here and in your work and putting this thing together and to your producer and your other cameraman, Justin Loya, who is the other cameraman behind this footage and this thing.
And can you tell me a little bit about where it's playing now?
Plans for future releases?
People can pay for it online somehow?
Or what's the deal with it?
Yeah, it's still popping up in some select theaters across the country.
But if not, you can just watch it on iTunes or Amazon.
Okay, great.
And it's Combat Obscura.
You can read great reviews about it, too, in Task and Purpose and some other places, too.
There's been some great writing about that.
So I hope you people take a look at it.
It's really good stuff.
All right.
Thanks a lot, man.
Thank you.
Appreciate it, Miles.
Thank you.
Okay, guys, that is Miles Lugosi.
He is the director and producer of Combat Obscura.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
