Progressive Political News

“The options for health care — especially emergency care — for the people of Gaza are reduced to zero,” the expert said.

In “How to Tell a True War Story,” an entry from his influential short story collection The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes that “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.”

Throughout the story, O’Brien cycles through self-doubt while recounting anecdotes from his time in the Vietnam War, emphasizing that the subjective nature of war stories defies fact-checking, moral clarity, and in some cases even language itself. “Sometimes it’s just beyond telling,” he writes.

This is a lesson that Navy SEAL-turned-filmmaker Ray Mendoza seems to have learned as well. His new movie Warfare, which he co-wrote and co-directed alongside Civil War and Arrival filmmaker Alex Garland, begins with a title card that reads, “Based on Memories.” Set in 2006, the autobiographical film follows Mendoza (played by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) and his fellow Navy SEALS as they take over a family home in Iraq’s Ramadi Province. 

Warfare is rarely as absurd as anything in Tim O’Brien’s postmodern stories. But its emphasis on the subjectivity of war allows Mendoza and Garland to cut through the political and economic issues surrounding the Iraq War to instead focus on the experience of war in the moment, and the humanity within it. 

According to a maxim often attributed to the French filmmaker François Truffaut, there’s no such thing as an anti-war movie, as the spectacular nature of cinema makes even the horrors of war look exciting and valiant. On a visual level, Warfare does nothing to disprove Truffaut’s point. The film opens with an oddly aggressive shot of a woman’s butt in tight-fitting lycra, a scene from an exercise video that the SEALS watch at some indeterminate point setting off on their mission. The scene plays like a sort of surreal prologue,with no clear connection to the rest of the film.

But once the SEALs begin their mission, it’s hard not to be taken in. When one of their snipers (Cosmo Jarvis) is injured by a grenade, Officer in Charge Erik (Will Poulter) calls in an evacuation, leading to increasingly violent escalations as the Iraqis fight back against the Americans.

Mendoza and Garland strip these events down to their core. None of the characters are given backstories, and some aren’t even given names. We know nothing about how this mission fits into the U.S. military’s larger strategic goals, nor about Iraqis’ defensive strategy. The plotting is minimal, with the film focusing instead on engrossing real-time scenes of war. After an explosion destroys an American vehicle in one scene, limbs lay on the ground and stay there for the duration of the film, just one more piece of detritus. During an extended and gory scene halfway through the film, medics attempt field surgery on an injured soldier while other soldiers repeatedly stumble over his shredded leg. 

Yet visceral as these visuals are, they won’t truly unsettle anyone familiar with the war movie canon. It’s now been more than twenty-five years since Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan set the standard for realistic depictions of violence and what weapons of war can do to the human body. While Mendoza and Garland match and perhaps in some cases succeed Spielberg’s skill in this department, Warfare’s graphic violence ultimately comes across as simply another technical element of its genre, no more impactful than torture scenes in a Scream or Saw movie. 

But while their use of graphic visuals does not succeed in immersing viewers in the battle, Mendoza and Garland find a more effective tool in Warfare’s sound design. Warfare is filled with noise; not music, which is completely absent from the film apart from the opening and closing titles, but rather, the sounds of battle and their impact on soldiers and civilians alike. A ripping sound follows jet fighters as they tear by. The targeted Iraqi homeowners, a family of two adults and two children, cry in the back bedroom, sequestered, as the Americans invade their house. Gunfire and explosions crack through the din.

Three instances of sound stand out in particular. The first is that of an American soldier, played by Joseph Quinn, wailing after his legs are destroyed in an explosion. Gruesome as his aforementioned wounds are, it’s the sound that stays with viewers more than the sight, because Mendoza and Garland never let the wailing stop, even once the soldiers’ blood and guts are no longer on screen. It continues long after the soldiers have fallen back from the explosion, through the continuing gunfire and the other SEALs’ attempts to communicate with their superior. The sound refuses to stay in its place, lingering long past the point at which the audience has made sense of its relation to the accompanying visuals—past the point of utility. It just continues.

Breath is the great equalizer of Warfare. Its attention to breath carries viewers through the film, from the outset, when one soldier exhales in boredom before the fighting has begun, to the heat of the moment, when another coughs while trying to control his breathing as he’s ordered to remain calm. In one moment, a soldier suddenly draws a deep breath as he jolts back to consciousness, shocking the friends who thought him dead. Soldiers or civilians, Iraqis or Americans, everybody breathes so long as they are living—a universal need that transcends the stakes of the conflict. 

But just as Tim O’Brien wrote that “[a] true war story is never moral,” Warfare seems generally disinterested in the virtues of war and peace. The result could easily be read as a pro-war film that highlights the bravery of the men who sacrificed all to complete their mission. But such a reading would require that the viewer understand the purpose of the mission, which the film never spells out, leaving us no way of knowing whether their actions were worth the suffering they caused. When, late in the film, the Iraqi mother screams “Why?” as her house is invaded, the soldiers provide no answer—and ultimately, neither does the film.

Rather than spell out its politics, Warfare aims to present the experience as Mendoza remembers experiencing it—the film offers what O’Brien would call the “story truth,” rather than a more neutral or objective “happening-truth.” In “Good Form,” another story from The Things They Carried, O’Brien makes this distinction to argue that the play of facts is not a game, something done to underscore his cleverness as a writer, but rather a form, a structural decision to better convey his experiences. “What stories can do, I guess, is make things present,” he writes. “I can look at things I never looked at.”

Warfare is somewhat unique in its depiction of things that modern Americans would probably rather not look at, particularly the plight of the Iraqi family whose lives are torn apart by the soldiers. But it also features many staples of the war movie genre. The result is a film that neither fully subverts the war movie genre nor lazily retreads its standard narratives. Through its sound design and its foregrounding of subjectivity over fact, “story truth” from “happening-truth,” allows us viewers to acknowledge things we never acknowledge in war movies, especially the human cost of war.

Border Patrol agents kept the couple in separate cells, and demanded to go through the husband’s emails.

Over the past year and half, I have received dozens and dozens of text messages from private developers inquiring about the land my grandparents owned before their deaths. Most of the messages begin the same way: a quick greeting followed by some variation of “Did you know you own a vacant lot? We have a proposal to take it off your hands!” I normally respond with a swift “no,” but on one or two occasions I entertain the anonymous and hopeful purchasers by asking how much they’re offering. I’ve done my research, and right now land in this area is selling for anywhere from $8,000–$30,000 per acre. I’ve never been offered more than $5,000 per acre during one of these interactions.

Thankfully, I’m no amateur, and my grandparents prepared me for moments like these. They spoke often of how predatory developers can be and how they devalue our land only to turn around and make millions off of it. Developers are only one prong of this sharpened pitchfork, they taught me, and there are countless other people and entities looking to push Black people off of the land we’ve fought for, sometimes with our lives. My grandfather in particular guided me to be proud as a sixth-generation Black landowner and to be vigilant of all who want to ensure I’m the last generation to make such a claim. In the twenty-first century, Black Americans own less than 1 percent of U.S. farmland. This alarming statistic is part of a larger, intergenerational legacy of land theft, and I know from conversations with my grandparents that our job is to remember and tap into our ancestral legacy of resilience. To never let go of what those before me had fought so hard for.

My grandmother, Jenail, was born to a family of Black sharecroppers in Candor, North Carolina, where segregation ruled much of her early life. Her family’s white landowner and employer controlled what they ate, where and how they lived, and the rate at which they’d be paid. Growing up, Grandma didn’t talk much about her childhood; I sensed it was a tender and painful memory for her. But as an adult, my research and writing forced me to ask more questions. As a young girl, Grandma never knew Black people who owned their own land—not until she met and fell in love with her future husband, Alfred. 

Jenail moved North during the Great Migration, ultimately settling in New Jersey, where she met Alfred Baker, another North Carolinian who had settled up North. Except Alfred didn’t carry the same dread of the South that Jenail did. His shoulders didn’t tighten when he journeyed home. He was freer and lighter there than anywhere else.

He still owned land in North Carolina with his parents and siblings and always wanted to return. That amazed Jenail and excited her.

Through marriage, Jenail became a landowner. The two spent most of their adult lives up North while visiting and planning for a retirement down South. During those visits, Jenail enjoyed the apple dumplings her mother-in-law made from scratch, the fresh eggs from the chickens clucking in the morning, and the water from the well they’d dug themselves. She also learned the story of the Baker land and of the life it had afforded the Baker family. Alfred’s great-grandfather bought it after emancipation from a Confederate widow, and each generation expanded those landholdings to the 600-acre Baker farm that they loved so much. After decades of systematic land loss and theft, Alfred worked fervently to buy back parcels of land they’d lost to private developers or after being unable to afford rising property taxes and predatory heirs’ property laws.

Heirs’ property has been dubbed “the leading cause of Black involuntary land loss” by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The laws dictate land left behind without a trust or formal estate plan will be communally held by those family members remaining. On the surface, heirs’ property seems like a harmless way for land to be divvied up among living descendants. But in practice, heirs’ property leaves Black landowners with little control over their property as courts opt for partitions by sale when distant family members sell their share to outsiders.

Let’s say, for example, that a parent’s land is left behind to five children as heirs’ property owners. Each child owns an equal 20 percent share of each acre. When those five siblings have children and their children have children, the share dwindles further and further. Often, hundreds of heirs will have an equal share of land that only a few people are invested in or living on. By nature of these “cloudy” deeds, heirs’ property owners are less eligible for programs and grants that allow them to sustain land ownership like securing a USDA farm number, aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), or the ability to launch businesses on their land. With the land in limbo, many heirs begin to see it as more burden than blessing, and are pushed into partition sales which benefit private developers and local lawyers more than the descendants intended to receive an inheritance from their deceased loved ones.

Initially, my grandmother wasn’t aware of this history. Jenail looked out at the Baker family land and saw something more beautiful than what she’d known as a sharecropper. With a husband who showed her land didn’t need to be synonymous with subjugation, Jenail ran fully toward the South again. Grandma began dreaming of the South, too—of a big blue home with a wraparound porch and a lake to look out over. She dreamt of bringing her children and grandchildren and teaching them to love it without being subjected to the early experiences she had. She took up space in ways she hadn’t been able to as a little girl—and the difference was ownership.

As I learned writing a book on this subject, Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership, land ownership was one of the first and only paths to Black autonomy. For Black families in the South, owning the land shapes your experience on it. It’s the difference between toiling away on the land and running a business on the land. The difference between being exploited and building wealth for your loved ones. Between being a pawn and being a stakeholder. I came to learn just how much it matters by talking to my grandmother. “From working on white people’s land as a sharecropper and now white people rent the land from us,” she once told me.

After my grandmother’s death, I became hypervigilant of the ways my elders and ancestors were pushed off of their land and how children bear the brunt of reversing those dynamics.

Land transfers to younger generations can be the key to intergenerational wealth or the continuation of intergenerational battles. When policy is designed to protect only those with trusts and private lawyers, the wealthy get wealthier while the working class grows poorer. We need to get more innovative as a society to ensure that the disenfranchised and dispossessed are offered some serious relief.

Within my family, I know that the responsibility has now fallen to us: Alfred and Jenail’s children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. This past Thanksgiving, we circled around a bonfire in the backyard of the home she and my grandfather built with their life savings. We talked about what made it possible for us to be there, how to expand the home, what new structures to build, how to take care of the lake, leasing land to renewable energy companies, and so much more. We made plans for newsletters to help the family remain connected to the land, and we all agreed to ignore any inquiries about selling the land because what we have is priceless. This land has been the site of two weddings, countless funeral repasts, and dozens of other celebratory moments. Just as Jenail and Alfred intended. A legacy we will keep alive for generations to come. 

Lately I’ve been wondering where the tipping point is: how long can pundits brandish phrases like “threat to democracy,” or debate whether the United States is in a “constitutional crisis,” before the perpetual asking of that question itself reveals the answer? If Donald Trump and his allies are whittling away at democracy’s very core, will…

The autopsies also found evidence that medics were shot with bullets that explode on impact, shredding their victims.

As 100,000 people gathered on April 5 for the Hands Off protest in Washington, D.C., 5,000 people convened just blocks away to protest an issue that was conspicuously absent from the Hands Off agenda: the ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

While the Hands Off movement, which reported millions of people participating in more than 1,300 anti-Trump protests nationwide, notably did not include foreign policy demands or any mention of Palestine in their motivations for mobilizing the national day of action, the March on Washington called for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the ongoing genocide.

The March on Washington was led by the Party for Socialism & Liberation (PSL) and the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition, who, among other organizations that obtained permits, bussed in groups of protesters and sponsored the staging for the day’s demonstration. Guest speaker Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), called for a practical show of force by becoming more civically engaged. “It is not enough to come here and speak to ourselves—we must engage our politicians [directly] with the megaphones and our voices,” Awad said, advocating for protesters to attend the April 28 and 29 National Muslim Advocacy Day in Washington, D.C.. 

Demands for the end of the U.S.-backed genocide in Palestine and the release of Rümeysa Öztürk, Mahmoud Khalil, Badar Khan Suri, and other scholars recently detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents echoed through the masses. 

The demonstrations remained nondisruptive throughout the day. Organizers deployed a team to keep protesters off sidewalks as they passed by tourists entering and exiting the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and as they gathered on the road in front of ICE headquarters.