WHISTLES FROM THE GRAVEYARD

For readers of Jarhead and Phil Klay, a Marine Combat Cameraman offers a character-rich, unfiltered look at military life in Afghanistan, from a Millennial perspective of soldiers raised with modern media and graphic video games.

An artsy kid from New York City, Lagoze was thrust into the battlefield and lived among a microcosm of Millennial America. The soldiers, largely men, largely Black and brown, are far less politically engaged than expected. They've arrived for promises of economic and educational security, not to play out a crusade. What politics he finds are nascent, poorly formed, and far less polarized than expected. But over time, and as he continues to produce images of glory and positive interactions with the occupied Afghani people his platoon deals with, Lagoze's psyche breaks down. The other side of the coin, the one his footage works to leave out, hides a grim reality.

Through a character-rich dispatch from the field in Afghanistan, Lagoze shows us acts of criminal brutality - on Afghan innocents - performed by men unsure of their mission and charged only with defining themselves through supposed acts of valor. Brains inured to violence by modern media and graphic video games set loose in a land where the locals are essentially being held captive in their own homes. We see the soldiers and locals drawn together by their overwhelming fear of the Taliban's violence, and then that fear too often unleashed on innocents caught in the crossfire.
This is a story of war, yes, but also of Lagoze - a "lost boy" who himself saw the grand delusion of war fade in the face of endless violence - and his fellow soldiers who are broken by the conflict and then set loose back into a country broadly indifferent to their sacrifices, but eager to exploit their pain.

In telling his personal story, Lagoze shines intimate and troubling light on the men and women on the ground, waves of whom have toiled in near-anonymity as America transitioned Afghanistan from "the right" conflict to embarrassing, backburnered political football. He touches on themes of manhood, emotional isolation, American nationalism, the relentless nature of the military-industrial complex, the country's blindspots around the people we send to war and where we leave them after it is over, and more. Lagoze's combat peers struggle with identity, they utilize racialized brutality to fill the psychological holes of modern-day American manhood, and several even became politically radicalized in the direction of extreme conservatism and white nationalist ideology.

WHISTLES FROM THE GRAVEYARD is a definitive account of the latter, most uncomfortable, stage of the Afghanistan War and a vivid look at a nearly-lost generation of American men.

Miles Lagoze is a filmmaker and director whose 2018 documentary entitled Combat Obscura received critical acclaim. The footage used in the documentary was obtained when Lagoze enlisted as a Combat Camera in the Marines when he was 18 and deployed to Afghanistan in 2011.