Content warning: suicide is a topic in this episode.
War in film is a staple genre in a tremendously lucrative industry. Hollywood inundates our culture with glamorous depictions of wars, both fictional and real. Yet the truth of America’s forever wars, both for the countries invaded and veterans who return home, are rarely explored in depth in popular culture. This Is Not a War Story explores one part of the human toll of US wars through the lens of veterans who return with physical and mental wounds. Writer-director and star Talia Lugacy and actor Eli Wright join The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the film. This is Not a War Story is available to stream and purchase on DVD.
Talia Lugacy is an independent film director, writer, and producer.
Eli Wright is a former Army combat medic who served in the Iraq War. He is now an artist who makes paper from military uniforms.
Production: Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino, David Hebden, Darian Jones
Post-Production: Adam Coley, Kayla Rivara
Audio Post-Production: Tommy Harron
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Chris Hedges:
The real story of war is never told by Hollywood. Its senselessness, cruelty, gruesomeness, and impersonalized, wholesale industrial slaughter of innocence are redeemed for the old cliches of glory, honor, heroism, and patriotism. The power of a lie makes it nearly impossible for those who return from war to speak the truth about war and to be heard. Talia Lugacy in her new independent film, This Is Not A War Story, rips back the veil on the vast enterprise of death that war is and tells the unflinching and painful story of the veterans who returned. Maimed physically and emotionally, coping with a deep existential crisis that comes with knowing we are not a good or virtuous country. That we are not the protectors of democracy and liberty. That we are not all powerful and destined to be triumphant.
The film opens with the death of the veteran Timothy Reyes, who overdoses on pills and dies in an empty subway car. It goes on to follow the struggle of another veteran, Will LaRue, who was holding Timothy up, helping him battle back against his demons. LaRue seeks refuge in a multi-generational community of veterans who make handmade paper out of shredded military uniforms. They use the paper to express their rage, humor, memories, trauma, loss, and hopes through art and poetry. The veteran, Isabelle, played by Talia, joins this community. She and LaRue navigate a world where they no longer fit and are not understood.
This film features a supporting cast of Iraq and Vietnam veterans, as well as their original artwork, poetry, and music. Joining me to discuss the film is Talia Lugacy, who wrote, directed, and acted in the film. And Eli Wright, who was an army combat medic in the US Army in Iraq and practices the craft of making handmade paper from military uniforms with fellow veterans and communities across the country. He also appeared in the film. So we’re going to begin with just the opening of the film. That scene on the subway.
[CLIP FROM FILM]
Chris Hedges:
So that, Talia, is the point of departure. A suicide. Why?
Talia Lugacy:
For me, the origin of this film came from my grappling with my own trauma and suicidal ideation. And through the research I was doing, crafting a story about that, I found this staggering veteran statistic that I had never known before. 22 veterans a day dying by suicide. This was in 2017. And this was accounting for veterans across generations. It wasn’t just current. So this led me down a path of reaching out to veterans and veteran communities and saying, “This is a story I’m working on. Does it resonate at all?” And because they were so encouraging about this story being told, we started to craft this together. And I knew very quickly that there was no way to make this film without involving veterans in all manner of the film. The production, the cast, everything. So we very much collaborated and made this together. And as a hybrid, it’s a very unusual kind of way to tell a story. But it was important for us for it to be a narrative and not a documentary. It needed the scope of a story to sort of-
Chris Hedges:
Well, most of the characters are struggling, at least with thoughts about suicide.
Talia Lugacy:
Yeah, that’s right. And part of the important thing for us was to represent that in a way that we hadn’t seen in other films. Oftentimes when you watch trauma or suicidal ideation depicted in movies, it’s very pat and people are able to talk about what they’re going through. And what I recognized and resonated so much for me when I found this community of veterans was that we all had this inability to talk about it, which is part of how you lead… This is what leads to the act of suicide, is this absolute disconnection and inability to talk. So all the silences in the film and the pausing and the awkwardness and the inability to articulate the experience was very important to all of us to represent.
Chris Hedges:
So you see in the film, Eli, this struggle on the part of the characters and the veterans to free themselves from their identity as part of the military. You were six years in the army. I wondered if you could address that and its importance and the power of indoctrination even for those who oppose the war.
Eli Wright:
Yeah. I mean the military indoctrination process is structured around breaking our identity, breaking our individuality to make us an effective part of a team. So when you go through that indoctrination process and then you don the uniform and you go through the crucible of combat, it creates this identity as just one part of a larger whole. We are not an individual. There is no I in team. There’s this whole kind of culture built around that.
And so the coming home process, there’s no de-indoctrination process. There’s no de-programming process from that. The military hands us a DD214 or whatever else and sends us out the door, and we’re on our own from there. So I think a lot of the struggle that military veterans go through is trying to figure out who am I now after this?
And as Talia mentioned, I think we lose the language. Trauma kind of breaks our ability to articulate what that experience was. So I think for many of us finding the arts, visual arts, creative writing, theater, music, whatever it may be, art gives us a way to discover or articulate a new language to talk about that experience.
Chris Hedges:
And in reclaiming that identity because you’re destroying your uniforms. You’re cutting them up and pulping them. In that attempt to reclaim your identity, how important is that ritual of destroying the uniform?
Eli Wright:
Well, some say destroying it, some say deconstructing it, some say reclaiming it. Each of us individually as part of that process of reclaiming our identity, approaches the uniform in a different way. We all have our own unique relationship to it. So the process of breaking the weave, breaking those threads that bind us together as soldiers has the ability to force us to kind of reckon with who we were, what we did while wearing those rags. And so taking it apart and transforming it, right, reconfiguring that back into a new form, it allows us to find our individuality again and reclaim our individual stories as humans who took part in something that was traumatic in many ways.
And so I think taking it apart and putting it back together is not just an act of destruction, it is very much also an active reclamation and an act of transformation that can take this symbol that has a negative association and it can help us come out the other end of that with hopefully a positive experience.
Chris Hedges:
Reminds me of the scene in Slaughterhouse 5, where Billy Pilgrim dreams of the Bomber going backwards and breaking apart into all of its organic parts. I want to go into another clip from the film. This is a very powerful moment where Will rifts on thank you for your service.
Will LaRue:
Timothy, last time we talked together told me about this woman in the hardware store. Apron, telling him something who thanked him for his service. Now, he doesn’t blame her, but he’s so fucking confused. Are you thanking me for killing people inside the city who were just driving down the road? How about for ripping a man in summer all away from his family? Humiliating him, detaining him, starving him, torturing him, thousands and thousands of him. Are you thanking me for blowing up a school or for blowing up a hospital? Are you thanking me for slaughtering a family in Mahmudiyah?
Maybe you’re thanking me for collateral murder? For SOP 360 rotational fire on an entire village in response to an IED? Or you feel some gratitude that we protected the interest of Exxon and laid down our lives for Halliburton or quadruple prophets for Raytheon? Could you be thanking me for Abu Ghraib or just for taking the pictures? No, you’re thanking me for the kill count. 200,000 dead civilians. Or is it thank you for the drone strikes that destroyed Mosul, Ramadi, Aleppo, Baghdad, Raqqa? Thank you for MST? For burn pits? Maybe I should thank you for standing by while it was all happening. I mean, I know you’re not thanking me for being a hero. I was a pawn. Anyway.
Chris Hedges:
So let me start with you, Eli. These, “Thank you for your service,” this cliche, which is… And I remember during the Iraq war being in airports in Dallas and soldiers, marines would walk by and people would applaud and I think Will kind of lays bare what you’re thanking people like you for. Talk a little bit about that cliche and about Will’s monologue.
Eli Wright:
I think almost any veteran that you ask how they feel about that statement has some struggle with it. Some appreciate it because there is at least some recognition maybe of our sacrifice. I’ve always struggled with that personally because to me it feels like there’s this serious detachment, a very harmful detachment, that civilians have from the reality of what is being done in their names by us. And so I think while oftentimes it is coming from a genuine place of at least acknowledgement or recognition of our sacrifice, it helps perpetuate this hero myth that we have about our service members that we only do good. And America throughout all of our wars has been very detached from the reality of what we’re actually doing. And I think Will’s monologue in the film really nails it.
Chris Hedges:
But doesn’t it create a kind of wider gulf between you? You’re celebrating a fiction on the one hand, but you know the reality?
Eli Wright:
Yeah, I think it can help reinforce and strengthen that detachment that we feel from our culture, our community, or our families when we come home. Because in the minds of many veterans, those words, that statement, can remind us that people have no idea what we’re doing, who we are, where we’ve been. And it can help reinforce that loneliness that… Yeah, the loneliness that can lead us to taking our own lives in many ways.
Chris Hedges:
Talia, one of the things I thought was very powerful in the film and kind of meshed with my own experience is that the greatest traumas not so much what you endured or what you witnessed, although that is traumatic, but what you did. And you were very cognizant of that and very explicit about it, and that runs throughout the film. Can you speak about that?
Talia Lugacy:
Sure. When I had first embarked on the film, I didn’t know the phrase moral injury. And I learned it. And it resonated very deeply with me because I recognized my own issues with trauma and trying to contend with it were feelings of shame and guilt over things that I perceived as my fault. And so the concept of moral injury being that you’ve crossed your own and betrayed your own moral compass, and then you have trauma as a result of this is a way into a critique of just war at large that I felt I had never seen before. And it seemed to me to correspond to this number of this crazy fact that more veterans die stateside than die in combat. It’s like we must be examining this and trying to fathom it. And that seemed to weigh into that. So that was the impetus there.
Chris Hedges:
You have some wonderful poetry written by veterans that are included in the film, and this is a poem by Kevin Basil.
Talia Lugacy:
We covered their eyes with sandbags, deprived their will of singing praise. Nine men kneeling, none of them cried out. Like secret police snaking the night, we slipped into their bedrooms. We ziptied their wrist tight, blood droplets, ink on their orange jumpers. We tried to snatch their dignity, spread fear by word of mouth. We learned it don’t work like that. Who knew? A cornered human won’t eat from your hand. Who knew? We covered their eyes with sandbags, deprived their will of simple purpose. We got the right guy, LT says again and again, again and again, echoing off into nothing. Even then I knew. Even then I felt the black hole open. I’ll try harder in another life. I won’t pretend to be a man born to kill. Now they’re ghosts wandering my thoughts. They’re somewhere else already, and I am here. Listen, what haunts me are not their curses, but this. The man who speaks perfect English, whose name is not ISN154234, but Ahmed. He’s a fruit seller, father of three. He passes me a paper flower, says he forgives me for I know not what I do.
Yeah, this poem is called The Detainee, and it was written for the film and we crafted it. Kevin and I were brainstorming it as a means for… Because this whole dimension of torture and the treatment of prisoners and detainees is a side that I don’t know that very many civilians have any awareness of, but it’s certainly a source of a lot of the experience of moral injury and the trauma that goes with that. This is a lot of where that may come from. So we wanted to include this and be very explicit about it.
Chris Hedges:
And I want to follow this poem with your poem, Eli, which you said is untitled.
Eli Wright:
Never knew how to cut through all the contradictions and confusion. It’s like dancing on landmines and swimming in sandstorms while marching into a war you didn’t get to vote for. With a rifle slung over one shoulder and a medical aid bag over the other. It’s doing everything you can to save a man’s life who just did everything he could to end yours. It’s seeing medics engaged in torture and infantry men engaged in medicine. It’s feeling death from the sound of a pounding heart while praying for a pulse and preaching to the choir about salvation. It’s choking on the smoke of everything you used to believe in after you burned it all to the ground. It’s building bridges, then putting up barriers so nobody can cross them. It’s like locking all the doors everywhere around you, then scattering the keys in obvious places, hoping nobody will find them.
It’s like coming back, feeling like a stranger, then running away to feel at home again. It’s being surrounded by everyone you love and feeling suffocated at the exact same time. Like writing speeches when you feel completely speechless and speaking out while you’re being strangled. It’s ducking for cover in the sunshine and searching for a ray of light in the shadows. It’s drinking away the night just to sleep away the day. It’s chain-smoking cigarettes under stress just to catch your breath. It’s your worst vice saving your fucking life. It’s why I’ve taken to wearing my heart on my sleeve nowadays to escape the prison of my ribcage because I’m sick of being trapped in this past life.
Chris Hedges:
And can you speak a little bit about that poem? Why you wrote it; what drove you to write it?
Eli Wright:
Ever since I came home almost 20 years ago, I, like many other veterans, have struggled to find the language to describe the experience. And what I’m trying to capture in the poem is that cognitive dissonance and that sort of paradox of these experiences that we all struggle with. And specifically as a medic, that was always one of my biggest struggles is the fact that I had to learn how to fire a rifle and take life before I was able to train as a medic and save lives. So that conflicting duality of my identity as a soldier was always a really big struggle for me to contend with. And so what I’m trying to capture in that poem is just this conflict of living trapped between these two worlds, these two experiences.
And the poem is still unfinished and I don’t really have any intentions of polishing it up and finishing it because part of it is trying to speak to that experience that you never fully come home and you never fully process that and you never are able to find closure with some of those experiences. And they live on as these kind of empty spaces in our lives that we struggle to fill, which many people do through alcohol or drugs. Some of us do it through art and poetry and trying to find something to fill that void with is what I’m trying to do with my artistic practice and with poetry.
Chris Hedges:
I want to talk about trauma. That’s of course a major theme of the film. And the characters are all battling against severe trauma against suicidal thoughts, deeply alienated from the society. They come together in this collective. But even then, we saw with the opening of the film, they’re not able always to save each other. You play a character who is deeply troubled, but I think you deal with it in a very subtle way, but you do address those avenues for redemption, those avenues for healing in the film. What are they?
Talia Lugacy:
One of them is just showing up. The fact that Isabelle, the character that I’m playing, you do see her at the end, at the edge of a bridge contemplating, but she does show up. She goes back to the studio, she just shows up. It’s another day. Maybe it’s another couple days, maybe it’s a couple of decades. But that was one of the first things that I really absorbed from being in this community of veteran paper makers was just the fact that there are people who are routinely showing up. Some Vietnam veterans also routinely showing up, and then they wouldn’t show up for a few weeks and you’d notice and people would know, and then there’d be a network of people who would look out for that person and ask and inquire.
The other thing was just the sheer mechanics of the process. I was immediately struck by just how physical it was and tangible and just the doing of something while you’re in the company of other people. You’re not obliged to look at people while you talk to them, which is really difficult to do when you’re feeling really anxious and all these other things. But if you have something to focus on and your hands are occupied, but then you have in your periphery people that you can relate to and you hear their voices and you’re present, it really makes just being present as a person possible. You can kind of relearn it. And that was another thing. It was really visceral for me and for that reason really became such a component of the film.
Chris Hedges:
It was a constant theme in the film of people being unable to sleep, which all of us who have been through trauma have struggled with. And over successive nights, I speak out of my own experience that inability to sleep is totally debilitating. So that after three or four days of really not sleeping, I remember just getting up and shaving and showering. It was almost Herculean. I want to talk about… We’re going to play this section of Everett, the poem of Everett, the Vietnam veteran who’s part of this collective rights.
Speaker 8:
The disability I was claiming was post-traumatic stress disorder. I was interviewed by a Veterans Administration psychiatrist. Do you know that most Vietnam veterans with your diagnosis killed themselves a long time ago? At that time, 1970, ’71, I was experiencing brutal nightmares. Every night, night after night, week after week, I would wake up screaming, fighting demons and ghosts. And that psychiatrist told me it was only going to get worse, never better. At that time, I was having terrible depressions. In hindsight, I would say I was close to being catatonic. It took everything I had to put my feet over the edge of the bed in the morning and to stand up like a man. And that psychiatrist told me it was only going to get worse, never better.
Eli Wright:
One of the first lessons I had to learn as a medic was that in order to treat the wound, first we have to expose it. That body armor that used to protect you, the camouflage that was supposed to hide you, now it’s just getting in the way.
Speaker 8:
At that time, the single biggest thing in my mind was suicide. It was not where, it was not how, it was only when. Tonight, tomorrow, just when. I could not cross a railroad track without thinking of stopping and putting my head on the rail. I could not cross a high bridge without thinking of stopping and jumping. I probably spent 1,000 hours on the George Washington Bridge pacing back and forth, and that psychiatrist told me it was only going to get worse, never better. So now, about 44 years later, another psychiatrist tells me, do you know that most Vietnam veterans with your diagnosis killed themselves a long time ago? As I thought of him, a little poem came to my mind. You called me Monster. You cornered me and trapped me. You forced me to chew my leg off and to hobble from one suicidal day to the next.
Chris Hedges:
So let’s talk, Eli, about the importance of multi-generational relationships among veterans, which Everett embodies. He is a Vietnam vet. I believe he did not speak about the war for many decades, but I know that figures like Everett, people who had come out of Vietnam were important for younger veterans coming as you did out of Iraq or Afghanistan.
Eli Wright:
Absolutely. Military service in America is often relegated to relatively few, and most folks who serve in the military have an elder family member who served before them. So we all have this awareness that the elder veterans are often helping to inform the experience and help younger veterans in that sort of transition process coming home. Especially as veterans like myself and many others who’ve been troubled by our experiences and have come home and spoken out about it. We were not welcomed home with open arms when we are critical of the military and the things that we’ve done. So having those Vietnam veterans who came before us and struggled with their own experiences and the ones that are still with us are the survivors. They’re the ones who’ve made it this far.
Chris Hedges:
I believe more Vietnam veterans have killed themselves-
Eli Wright:
Correct.
Chris Hedges:
… than were killed in the war, correct?
Eli Wright:
Right. So the relatively few that we have left, we honor as uncles and as these treasured elders who we’ve depended upon greatly to kind of take our hand and guide us home from the wars and kind of give us the talking to that we need. Many of us come home and we start diving into the bottle and all these unhealthy coping mechanisms. And one of the veterans in the film as well, Walt, is somebody who has also helped as somebody who’s advised me a lot about the dangers of alcohol and things like that. And so turning to art and turning to my training as a medic, which in the scene that I had the honor of sharing with Everett, I’m able to hopefully impart a little bit of my own training and a little bit of the wisdom that I learned in my experience to help him come home as an exchange.
Chris Hedges:
Well, you talk about opening the film, opening the wound. That you have to open the wound.
Eli Wright:
Yeah. You expose the wound first in order to heal it. And I think that’s one of the things that resonated me with me the most about the artistic process is that we have to rip off that body armor that we’ve been hiding behind and the camouflage that’s been protecting us from danger. And we have to cut and rip and expose all of that away in order to treat the wounds.
So having that experience with Everett and these other elder veterans where they provide us with this essential wisdom that has helped them survive this far. And then as a younger veteran and as a medic, specifically in my experience, to be able to take that training and kind of transform it in this way, that I’m able to adapt it into this other creative process. And some of the essential core of that, while I’m not literally treating anybody’s wounds anymore, I have been able to find that through the artistic process. We’re also able to treat these wounds that we carry home. And so I think that intergenerational collaboration that you see in this film is essential to our survival.
Chris Hedges:
Great. That’s a great film, Talia. How can people get it, watch it?
Talia Lugacy:
Yeah, you can watch it on HBO Max and you can also buy the DVD, which has a lot of bonus content. Poems that didn’t end up in the film.
Chris Hedges:
How do they get the DVD?
Talia Lugacy:
It’s available in the Amazons and the-
Chris Hedges:
Oh, there you go.
Talia Lugacy:
… Barnes & Nobles of the World or whatever.
Chris Hedges:
Okay. We’re going to close, as the film does, with this amazing film by Tom Waits… Song by Tom Waits. Hell Broke Geoff and Luce.
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