Let's just assume that Memorial Day means something more than a coveted three-day weekend in the first fair days on the edge of summer. Because it does. And let's agree that spending $12 to see a Hollywood blockbuster wherein Mark Wahlberg sports a dirty face while he rolls around the hills outside Santa Fe doesn't quite cut it either. Here's your mission: Sit in this theater. Listen to these dudes talk about real war and real homecoming. Watch their eyes glisten and their lips tremble and their faces go back to hard again. What they have to say is something every American should witness. Once a Marine is far from polished. It opens with the eerie green glow of a night-vision camera, accompanied by the sounds of war: loud booms followed by celebratory yells, dogs barking, screamed commands and admonition, choppers circling, bullets cracking. This footage and that of the other overseas scenes was captured not by some embedded media hack, but by fellow infantryman Stephen Canty, deployed a second time to Afghanistan and involved in the 2010 offensive in Marjah. He captures the surreal pinks and reds of poppy fields along with raw images of the wounded in battle and jarring jostles of muddy furrows. Two weeks after the battle, Charlie Company returned home. And after that, Canty visited several of his fellow soldiers for intimate interviews. These are rough-cut interviews with amateur lighting and marginal sound. Several men swill from beer cans while they talk. One cleans up a bedroom in his mother's house that's littered with empty heroin bags and cigarette butts. As is true for many of our fighting men and women, the reintegration did not go well. Their physical and emotional wounds have not healed. Those latter ones might not ever. Canty, who hails from Virginia and made a home in New Mexico two years ago, will offer a Q&A alongside featured Marines Xavier Zell, Geoffrey Heath and Darren Doss at the film's free showing at 8 pm on Memorial Day.
Santa Fe Reporter