Horse sense v. horses’ asses

Demony wojny w/g Goi (Demons of War [according to Goya]) 1998 Poland (93 minutes) written and directed by Władisław Pasikowski

This is a good war movie about the problems that politicians with legal training leave to professional soldiers to clean up, often with unpredictable consequences.

These narratives typically come down to the conflict between the horse sense of the boots on the ground and the nonsense of horses’ asses making Big Decisions in government ministries far from the landmines and cracking bullets.

In this story, a tough-as-nails Warsaw Pact-trained Polish airborne officer commands a battalion of Poland’s elite 6th Air Assault Brigade (Airborne) working with NATO peacekeepers in Bosnia-Hercegovina. The Polish battalion and a co-assigned Norwegian army unit are part of IFOR, the ‘Implementation Force’ tasked to implement the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords.

Major [Edek/Edward] Keller (Bogusław Linda) is the kind of maverick military hero politicians and his own higher-ups find it as difficult to live with as to go without. An airborne unit under Keller’s command was the best-trained in the Warsaw Pact, and he had peacekeeping experience in the Lebanon. He also was relieved of a command for pushing post-Cold War era troops too hard.

There is an additional spotlight on this unit because the action takes place in the late 1990s when Poland was pending NATO full membership.

The film opens with Keller leading a patrol that rolls into a town square in Srebrenica in two armored vehicles, moments after a violent crowd captured three men in military fatigues whom it clearly intends to execute. 

Without harming anyone or getting involved in the who-shot-Ivan politics, Keller and his men take charge of the three captives, drive them 15 kilometers out of town and turn them loose on a bridge. Keller strikes one of the three men, a mercenary who has the temerity to suggest that ‘we are all just soldiers doing someone else’s bidding.’

The next thing Keller knows, the Polish defense ministry sends Lieutenant Czacki (Olaf Lubaszenko) a staff lawyer from the military procurator’s office, to investigate his part in the ‘incident in Srebrenica’—the intervention which resulted in the rescue and release of the three captives about to be shot. Keller apparently was accused of executing the men himself. The ministry also assigns Major [Czesiek/Czeslaw] Kusz (Tadeusz Huk) to take over Keller’s command.

The man Keller punched on the bridge (Christophe Rex-Jarnot), identified throughout the film only as ‘a mercenary,’ is in the hire of Skija (Slobodan Custić), a ‘bandit’ with a multi-national gang more interested in personal gain and ‘sport’ than ethnic politics.

Skija’s bandits give Czacki and Kusz a hot welcome. They and the driver, Corporal ‘Houdini’ Moraczewski (Zbigniew Zamachowski), are rescued by a passing patrol, led by Cichy (Mirosław Baka), one of Keller’s equally tough platoon leaders. 

The drama and characters develop during the film’s set piece, in which Keller and Cichy lead a patrol of well-trained but not battle-tested paratroopers to rescue an IFOR task force Norwegian helicopter downed by Skija’s bandits. Kusz and Czacki accompany the team ‘to observe.’

The story ‘got personal’ when Keller hit the mercenary on the bridge. The stakes go up after Keller liberates two of Skija’s hostages connected with material evidence of his war crimes: Nicole (Aleksandra Nieśpielak), a French television journalist, and Dano Ivanov (Denis Delić), a dodgy Balkans ‘government representative.’ Keller also takes an interest in a ‘Gypsy’ village in harm’s way. A twist in the tale gives the story a clean finish.

Demony wojny według Goi apparently was the first Polish film released on DVD. The reference in the film’s title to Francisco de Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra etchings, a series of which appear as background to the title credits, feels unnecessarily arty. It is Keller’s humanity and professional grasp of war’s ‘disasters’ that gives him the skills to navigate and survive this perilous terrain.

This film does a good job showing the less glamorous side of men under fire, in advance of similar treatment in the new generation of American feature films and documentaries of war released since the American-led Crusade began a decade ago. 

Though not tongue-in-cheek, this story bears comparison with Danis Tanović’s classic satire Ničija zemlja [No Man’s Land] (2001), also set in the Bosnian war. In that film, a Bosnian civilian soldier, a regular Serbian Army enlisted man, and a French NATO sergeant try to save the life of a Bosniak whose temporarily unconscious body Serbian soldiers laid as a booby trap on a ‘bouncing betty’ land mine. This delicate task takes place under the klieg light of European Union political posturing and a media circus between the front lines in the Bosnian war.

Apart from the disparagement with which many Americans greeted the Bush fils ‘alliance of the willing,’ Americans get scant notice of the country’s many political allies engaged in its foreign policy in action. Several notable foreign films show what American foreign policy looks like through the eyes of its allies.

Armadillo (2010), a documentary about a contingent of the Danish Guard Hussar Regiment in Afghanistan, came out the same year as Sebastian Junger’s and Tim Hetherington’s Restrepo. A memorable edit comes when a grenade flung on a video game cuts seamlessly to an explosion in the lethal night outside an armored personnel carrier screened inside via infrared camera.

Brødre [Brothers] (2004), Susanne Bier’s searing feature about the readjustment problems of a Norwegian special operations officer presumed dead who returns home from Afghanistan after a period of captivity, five years later became Jim Sheridan’s Brothers (2009), starring Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman.

We are meant to feel the senselessness of war in the severe and outsized impact these soldiers’ harrowing experiences has on their civilian families. This senselessness feels the more poignant when the soldier comes from a small civilized country that seems to have so little at stake so far away from his home. 

In Armadillo, an enlisted Danish medic telling a newcomer about finding a dead comrade and picking up another soldier’s body parts, said:

‘You have to keep an eye on yourself. You’re not wacko just because you laugh at some irrelevant stuff. You need normality, because this is so meaningless that you can’t grasp it.’