Show Notes
Van and Lyle are joined by journalist Sam Carliner to unpack Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, a 2023 entry into the Afghanistan war movie canon. Together they examine how the film reinforces the myth, heavily circulated in the wake of the 2021 U.S. pullout, that American troops and Afghan interpreters were bonded as brothers in arms, fighting a noble, shared war against evil. While the film’s central relationship between Master Sergeant John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his Afghan interpreter Ahmed (Dar Salim) is marked by quick banter and trust, the reality on the ground was often far icier; mutually suspicious relationships shaped by Islamophobia, infiltration, coercion, and years of betrayal. The conversation digs into the emotional beats of the film and what they obscure. Kinley and Ahmed each risk their lives to save the other, and their intertwined fates become the “covenant” of the title. But rather than offering a serious reckoning with U.S. violence, the film functions as a feel-good fable of reciprocal loyalty, centering a “Good Muslim” who rescues his “Good American” friend, only to be rescued in return—with the arrival of private contractors cast as a climactic moment of salvation rather than as mercenary forces profiting off the neo-colonial periphery. The backdrop of a 20-year U.S. occupation and a 40-year civil war, both shaped and fueled by American policy, is left untouched. The film doesn’t argue the U.S. should have stayed in Afghanistan, but it’s steeped in post-withdrawal melancholia, more interested in soothing American audiences than engaging historical truth. And yet, in its final scene, Kinley and Ahmed staring blankly from the cargo bay of a C-130, the production evokes an eerily similar ending to Zero Dark Thirty: The protagonists afloat in transit, surrounded by machinery, without any real sense of where they’re going or why. Further Reading Sam’s Substack No Good Men Among the Living by Anand Gopal The Fort Bragg Cartel by Seth Harp Good Muslim, Bad Muslim by Mahmood Mamdani Bang-Bang doing Zero Dark Thirty Teaser from the Episode Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant Trailer
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From the vault! Re-releasing one of our earliest and most popular episodes, with antiwar veteran and organizer Alexander McCoy. New episode coming next week. ✌️ “When I understand my enemy well enough to defeat him, then in that moment, I also love him.” So begins the 2013 film adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s classic sci-fi novel Ender’s Game. Neither achieving box office nor critical success, the movie still evokes a wide range of reactions. Especially when it comes to its ambiguous relationship to the original text. Van and Lyle have fellow vet and strategist Alexander McCoy on the show to debate their competing reads. Along the way, they come to agree that certain insights gleaned from the cinematic rendering might be at odds with Card’s politics. Ranging from the ultimate lovelessness of war to the emptiness of any strategy unharnessed from justice and peace. Alex on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/alexandermccoy.bsky.social Further Reading “A Primer on Orson Scott Card and the Ender’s Game Controversy,” by Anna Silman The Internationalists, by Alexander Ward “The Great Humbling,” by David Klion “Four Futures,” By Peter Frase Strategy and Conscience, by Anatol Rapaport Ender’s Game Trailer Teaser From The Episode
Ryan Miller, the next on the show’s fellow veteran lineup, was a Marine in Okinawa from 1998 to 2002, spent years in About Face: Veterans Against the War, helped Oakland decriminalize plant medicines in 2019, and now works as a therapist in psychedelic integration. He joins us to discuss Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk’s film documenting three special operators from SEAL training through Afghanistan to Iraq to a clinic in Mexico, where ibogaine and toad venom do what sixty pills a day could not. For Lyle the film’s real subject is a trauma apparatus built to repair faulty equipment rather than heal people (one SEAL is sent to the military’s brain-injury center, patched up, and returned for four more deployments). As the scholar Nadia Abu El-Haj has argued in Combat Trauma, PTSD was popularized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in rap groups that turned pain into politics. As the decades followed, this promising origin story nonetheless raced toward an endpoint constituted—in Ryan’s words—by psychedelic-assisted stormtroopers. Van invokes Fanon’s French torturer, begging his psychiatrist for a way to sleep at night and keep his job. Then there is the narration itself, where the enemy appears only as bad guys, terra nullius in uniform. No Afghans, no Iraqis, not even Mexicans in a film set half in Mexico. The one line that breaks the frame, a SEAL wondering whether we’d have a military at all if we didn’t abuse children, lasts no more than a second. Further Reading and Listening Ryan Miller’s therapist profile Combat Trauma by Nadia Abu El-Haj “Can we heal wartime trauma without confronting the real causes of war?” by Lyle Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks “Colonial War and Mental Disorders” from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth Bang-Bang’s Netflix’s Marines episode w/ Sam Carliner Bang-Bang’s Combat Obscura episode Teaser from the Episode In Waves and War Trailer
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com