In The Valley Of Elah

I just watched In The Valley Of Elah starring Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron.

It’s about a Vietnam war veteran who went searching for his son, who’s an army regular, who came back from an attachment to Iraq but was reported missing.

Tommy Lee Jones acted as Hank Deerfield. His son was Michael Deerfield.

To cut the long story short, after some initial denial by Michael’s platoon mates over his actual whereabouts. Near the end of the movie, one of them, called Bonner, finally confessed to stabbing (over 40 times) Michael to death. Michael’s platoon mates also chopped up his body and burned his body parts.

Originally, they wanted to bury the burnt body parts. But they were overwhelmed by hunger and used Michael’s credit card to buy themselves 3 chicken meals and forged Michael’s signature to sign on the bill. This just showed how numb and unfeeling they had grown to become. A very sick, sure and serious symptom of what psychologists call “post-traumatic stress disorder”.

This movie illustrated how sick some of these army regulars have become. They have totally lost their conscience after being subject to senseless bloody, gory violence day in day out in Iraq.

So much to the extent they don’t even feel the slightest sense of guilt and remorse over the killing and eventual cover-up of one of their platoon mates.

Michael, was very much affected by the violence in Iraq too. There was once, (before he died, of course) he was driving a Humvee along the streets of Fallujah and he literally ran down an Iraqi kid. As there was a rule that they were not supposed to stop at all when they were passing thru any town. He felt bad about it at first. He even called his father in America and cried that he wanted desperately to get out of Iraq right there and then. Hank thought that Michael was just experiencing typical emotions associated with a tour of duty.

After some time, not only did Michael seem to get over the guilt, he even enjoyed torturing a haji prisoner. There was a haji man who was shot in the arm, and as they were on their way to the hospital, Michael kept pressing his finger into the haji’s arm where the bullet wound was. Michael asked, “Does this hurt?” The poor haji man screamed “YES!” in agony but Michael relished in tormenting the haji and kept pressing his finger into the wound repeatedly.

At the end of the movie, Hank hung outside a school, a tattered American flag sent by his son before coming back to America, upside down to signal that everything was not all right and the country was in distress. He duct-taped the ropes of the flag staff and instructed the school's custodian to leave it like that, even at night.