Navy SEALs: The Movie

I turned on the TV tonight to find the 1990 film Navy SEALs “starring” Charlie Sheen, Michael Biehn, and Bill Paxton. To say that the movie is hokey would be fairly generous. It was essentially a weak imitation of Top Gun, which seemed to exist only to parrot cheesy military cliché’s like, “Trust me with your life, not your money or your wife.” For the uninitiated, a strangely configured “team” of SEALs goes up against Islamic terrorists in Lebanon, climaxing in an operation in Beirut to plant demo charges on a stolen batch of Stinger missiles, but not before Sheen gets his Chief killed trying to engage a target instead of remaining hidden.

Nevertheless, this film was certainly responsible for an increase in Spec War recruiting, although I had already joined the Navy by the time it was released. There are some froggy scenes in the film that surely piqued the interest of potential recruits like locking out of a submarine and the obligatory skydive with Draegers followed by an underwater over the horizon transit. If that last one doesn’t make sense to you, you’re not alone.

The interesting thing about watching the movie again this time was that the “team” commander (Biehn) contacted an American journalist with connections in Lebanon to gain information about the terrorists and the location of the missing missiles. In 2006 America, this is something of a quaint proposition. Imagine a Newsweek reporter with AQ sources actually ASSISTING the US military in capturing or killing them. Unthinkable. Another refreshing aspect of the film is that the SEAL’s adversaries are actually muslim terrorists as opposed to some generic eastern Eurotrash with vague KGB ties. The only other film I can remember that dared to place the US military up against islamofascists was another cheesy spec ops movie starring none other that Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin, Delta Force.

Here we are four years and change following the most lethal terrorist attack in history that launched two wars and resulted in the deaths of more than 2000 US Servicemen and Hollywood doesn’t have the stones or is it the inclination (or both) to make a film pitting the United States against our most obvious enemy. Hardly anyone knows the name Paul Ray Smith, the soldier that was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions during the Iraq invasion which saved 100 fellow soldiers. Suicide bomb attacks garner more media attention these days than the Marines clearing whole cities of insurgents on the Syrian border. The Washington Post even takes time out of its busy schedule of leaking top secret program details to smear a milblogger who left his family and job to risk his life in Iraq patrolling with the Marines in Anbar as a propaganda tool. Now that’s rich. The fact that a man felt compelled to leave his otherwise normal domestic American life to embed with Marines in combat so that the actual stories of valor and victory could be told to his countrymen pretty much says it all.

Discuss.

By the way, my favorite character in the film was Paxton, but not because he was a sniper with the call sign "god" wielding a .50 cal rifle with sights that switched from IR to thermal with the push of a button. He was the grey man. Quiet, unassuming with a thick country mustache and a dry humor. That's what most Team guys are like, not Charlie effing Sheen.