In
the earliest days of Operation Enduring Freedom, Special Forces Team 595 became
the first military unit to engage the enemy on horseback. Their heroic efforts have
been immortalized with the America’s
Response Monument in front of World Trade Center One. Fifteen years later,
the Green Beret veterans reflect on their fateful service in Greg Barker’s Legion of Brothers (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York.
The
595 and the 574 were some of the first American boots on the ground. The 595
embedded with the North Alliance outside of Mazar-e-Sharif, while the 574
largely operated on their own in the south, before eventually coordinating with
Hamid Karzai and his forces. Most Americans have forgotten—if they ever really
knew—just how quickly and successfully this Special Forces vanguard completed
their mission. Frankly, they had all but toppled the Taliban before any proper
military chain of command arrived in-country. Then things started to get
complicated.
Obviously,
you cannot get bogged down in a country if you only have a few dozen military
personnel deployed there. It is a different matter when you get up to the tens
of thousands. The Green Berets were also effective diplomats who won the trust
of their Afghan allies. They also had hard won local knowledge they could
immediately apply to any tactical situation. Unfortunately, when the higher-ranking
officers arrived, they started issuing dubious orders to justify their presence,
which led to the horrific tragedy that dominates Legion’s third act. At least that is how Barker and the Special Forces
veterans see it—and the deeply remorseful officer in question never really
contradicts them. It is just painful to watch the haunted officer’s interview
segments.
In
many ways, Legion is an eye-opening
documentary. Yet, should we really be surprised that decentralized decision-making
yields better results than a rigid top-down command-and-control model? Now if
Barker and CNN Films will apply these lessons to the economy, we might really
start to get somewhere.
It
is absolutely maddening to compare Afghanistan as the 595 and 574 left it, with
the state of the country today. However, Barker and his subjects focus more on
their own grief for fallen comrades. Throughout the film, Barker’s sympathies
fall squarely behind the Green Berets, but he is not quite as scrupulously nonpartisan
and agenda-less as Christian Tureaud, David Salzberg, and Alex Quade, whose films
represent the gold standard of embedded documentaries. It seems safe to say
Barker has issues with the way Afghanistan operations have been conducted
during the subsequent fifteen years, which is fair enough.
