DVD Pick of the Week for You to Love with a Gentle but Firm Hand

As I get older, I find myself more and more fascinated with history. Military history and religious history are by far my favorite subjects. Between the two, you get a fairly comprehensive look at how the world around you has come into being. Errol Morris’s The Fog of War offers an insider’s candid ruminations on some of the most important military conflicts in modern history.

Robert S. McNamara was not only the Secretary of Defense under JFK and LBJ, but also served in the military during WWII. In the film, he sits down with Morris for an interview that begins with the conflict in Japan during WWII and talks in-depth about the mistakes the U.S. made in the Vietnam War.

When I saw the film in the theater years ago, the first major revelation that McNamara made (at least for me) was about the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. He implicitly says that we were wrong to drop those bombs. The country, he explains, had been firebombed to oblivion. The Japanese cities of the time were built mostly from wood. Relentless firebombing runs decimated vast swaths of the urban landscape and inflicted casualty rates of 50-90% (according to McNamara) in the civilian population.

Yet the U.S. still decided to drop two experimental atomic devices that instantly claimed 120,000 civilian lives and led to 100,000 more eventual deaths due to radiation poisoning. Yes, the Japanese imperial government was impossibly proud, but prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Japanese infrastructure had been nearly obliterated. It was only a matter of time.

The real reason we dropped the bombs? Well, as they always say, “follow the money.” The Manhattan Project cost an estimated 2 billion dollars (roughly 23B in today’s dollars). For that amount of money, a few mushroom clouds in the desert just don’t cut it. Also we did it to show Russia and China that the U.S. had ascended to “biggest dog on the block”-status.

In a moral vacuum, what we did makes perfect sense. What bothers me is how the decision to drop the bombs has always been painted as this grave but necessary maneuver that saved the lives of countless U.S. troops who would have presumably been forced to embark on a ground invasion. To quote Sgt. Al Powell from the greatest movie ever: “Wake up and smell what you shoveling!”

But enough about that.

The film also talks about how and why we failed in Vietnam. The parallels to Iraq are obvious and you just wish that someone would have forced the current administration to watch this film about five times.

So go rent this movie, because it’s good for you to see how the military works and how smart people end up making really bad decisions.