"12 Strong: Inside the Making of a Hollywood War Epic" Topic

"When I received a phone call from a representative for famed producer Jerry Bruckheimer to visit the remote mountains of New Mexico to see the filming set for the forthcoming Afghan war movie, 12 Strong: The True Declassified Story of the Horse Soldiers, I was prepared to be underwhelmed. The movie, which retells the remarkable story of a brotherhood forged between Afghan Uzbek horse warriors and an elite Special Forces A-Team in the mountains of Afghanistan, is a story I have professionally immersed myself in exploring and bringing to life for a decade and a half. My journey to uncover the hidden story of this special operations campaign that united Green Berets with fierce Uzbek Mongols as a proxy fighting force to overthrow the entrenched Taliban regime had consumed me and, on a couple of occasions, almost led to my death. I still shudder at the memory of being told not to jump down from the clay wall of a small mountain firing post used by the anti-Taliban rebels when one of my Uzbek friends warned me there were landmines planted directly where I was about to land.

To put it mildly, after all, I had been through to shed light on this covert campaign from the Uzbek perspective in articles, books, talks to the NSA, Army's Information Operations and CIA's Counter Terrorism Center, etc. I was skeptical that Hollywood could capture the essence of this story of men from different worlds uniting to capture an ancient shrine. How could a movie studio based in California capture the immense, majestic beauty of Afghanistan's soaring Hindu Kush Mountains? The almost primordial beauty of her warring ancient Aryan, Persian, Mongol, and even Greco-Macedonian tribes, the glory of the ancient blue domed shrine of Mazar i Sharif (the crucible of Afghanistan) and the authentic facts behind the covert 2001 helicopter "infill" of 12 Green Berets and 8 CIA operatives into the Afghan "Graveyard of Empires?"

As an author of seven books on warfare and ethnicity in an around Afghanistan and professor of Islamic History, I should also state that my greatest fear was that the director and producer would relegate the country's fascinating ethnic groups, who had so welcomed me on my five journeys across the region, to mere local backdrop in their efforts to lionize the American special forces. The incredibly brave Green Berets were, of course, worthy of all the attention focused on them (as much as their commander, a self-effacing Kansan named Mark Nutsch who I am proud to call friend, disliked the focus on him and his team of ‘shadow warriors'). But I had grown tired of the ultra-patriotic "black" and "white" War on Terror genre of films that simplistically divided the world between good Americans and bad Muslims. With the notable exception of Lone Survivor, Hollywood movies dealing with warfare in the Islamic world completely dismissed the rich ethnic fabric or "human terrain" of societies that America has been fighting in since 2001. For movie producers, as for most Americans, the world was and is simplistic and, binary. It is us versus them, … the Muslim "Others." The nuanced fact that across the globe brave Muslim Kurdish Peshmerga warriors whom I have embedded with, Iraqi Special Forces, Pakistani/Afghan troops, etc. whom I have had the pleasure of seeing in action are our greatest allies in the war on the jihadi terrorists was lost in such movies as Act of Valor, American Sniper or Zero Dark Thirty…"
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Amicalement
Armand

A great review. I'm hoping the movie lives up to it.

My ex-brother-in-law was one of these guys. A real badass from the stories I heard afterwards. Unfortunately, too many deployments turned a really nice guy into a man with with quite a few demons. If the movie captures what he told me it should be really good.

Glad you like it my friend!.

Amicalement
Armand

The movie was very good. I enjoyed it. I'm sure that it was probably "Holywoodized" a bit, but it was still amazing to see what those men did!