Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Shaped up, shipped out ... and feelin' so blue. The image of the melancholy soldier has become country music's money shot.
Jun 22, 2004 | Last month was National Military Appreciation Month, and in anticipation of the event, Orange, Calif., high school freshman Shauna Fleming decided she needed to do something. She settled, as eager, civic-minded teens sometimes do, on a letter-writing drive. The campaign, titled A Million Thanks, has to date collected almost 600,000 notes of encouragement and support for disbursement to American troops overseas and here at home.
Think of it as an Amnesty International movement for prisoners of politics, as opposed to political prisoners.
Fleming was inspired in part by a song and video that had just begun to grab attention, John Michael Montgomery's "Letters From Home." The song is No. 2 on the Billboard country music singles chart right now, and in heavy rotation on the two country music video stations, CMT and GAC. The lyrics document three letters to a soldier penned by people he's left behind: first, his warm-hearted mother, then his lonely girlfriend and, finally, his stoic father. The accompanying video culminates in what has emerged as a country music video money shot: the melancholy soldier.
Though a bit treacly, the song has a few adept songwriting flourishes -- "They all laugh like there's something funny 'bout the way I talk/ When I say, 'Mama sends her best y'all.'" In the video -- filmed at the Army Aviation Support Facility No. 1 in Smyrna, Tenn., and featuring National Guard soldiers as the supporting cast -- a baby-faced serviceman (played by an actor, Fred Mullins) pores over the words from home, sharing them (and Mama's cookies) with his bunker mates. Camaraderie is the order of the day -- being deployed almost seems like light work. But by the time he gets to the letter from his square-jawed father -- "Your stubborn ol' daddy ain't said too much," his mother groans in the first one -- he's reduced to tears. For a moment, it seems as if the video might turn transgressive -- the revelry comes to a stop, and the realities of war begin to reveal themselves: distance, confusion, fear. The protagonist's unit mates leave him alone with his sadness, because, as the song says, "ain't nothing funny when a soldier cries."
But when the chorus kicks in -- "I fold it up and put in my shirt/ Pick up my gun and get back to work" -- the soldier does just that, his pride swelling along with the impending engagement with the enemy. By video's end, emotional dissent has been quashed as he gets in the back seat of a sand-colored Jeep, shoves the letter inside his uniform and prepares a steely gaze to guard against what's to come.
On Fleming's Web site, next to the shots of her handing letters to actual soldiers, is a shot that shows her grinning side by side with Mullins, the actor. In this case, the virtual soldier is just as important as the real thing.
If images have been the undoing of the conceit that was meant to be the Iraq liberation project -- photos of flag-draped caskets, digital snaps of the humiliations of imprisoned Iraqis, grainy videotapes of a gung-ho American's beheading -- then it's not surprising that softer representations of the wartime soldier are being promulgated in other arenas. A spate of videos in current rotation on country music television are perhaps the most vivid of these public, fictive images. These used to be called propaganda; now, they're just part of pop culture.
Country music's jingoistic tendencies are well-documented. (Witness, for example, the "Patriotic Country" compilation -- and then try to imagine a "Patriotic Rap" or "Patriotic Emo" companion set.) Unsurprisingly, it's become the most active arena in the attempted restoration of the military's public image. These days the teary-eyed soldier is everywhere on CMT, seen in 75 million homes, just shy of MTV's 88 million. The message is clear: He's humane, he's human, and he's fighting for the cause of right (or, more accurately, the right). These fictionalized accounts offer all the perks of embedding without the messiness of actual combat. And what they quite calculatedly show are not the tragedies of war -- the fighting, the bloodshed, any actual engagement with an enemy -- but rather the less contentious moments that round out a soldier's experience.
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