Hurt Locker: Blowing their Cover?

By Terese Schlachter, Pentagon Channel Producer

March 10, 2010 - Film director, Kathryn Bigelow heard a story worth telling and ran with it. That’s how she came to be standing on the stage Sunday night at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood, holding two Oscars for the movie, “The Hurt Locker”.

“I’d just like to dedicate this to the women and men in the military who risk their lives on a daily basis in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world. May they come home safe,” Bigelow said to her well teased, Botoxed and collagen audience.

Bigelow became the first female director to win the Oscar. It was a low budget film. It was in no more than 525 movie theaters at once. Most people had never heard of “The Hurt Locker” until Oscar started buzzing. I thought it was cool that no one asked “who” she was wearing.

For those of you who’ve been deployed under rocks and such, The Hurt Locker is the story of an Explosives Ordnance Disposal team, headed up by Sgt. Will James, played by actor Jeremy Renner. The movie is intense. Sgt James is a hot dog. He engages explosives in a contest for survival: the first to be dismembered looses. James is flanked by two much more safety conscious and back-home minded people, JT Sanborn, played by Anthony Mackie and Owen Eldridge played by Brian Geraghty. They both want James to knock it off.

“Stolen valor”, is what Master Sergeant and EOD technician Jack Canady calls Bigelow’s new found fame. “The techs that are out there doing this right now are the ones who deserve the recognition, not Mr. Renner, not Ms. Bigelow. They didn’t put themselves in harm’s way. They used a camera. They created a product.”

“His character was outlandish for the way we work,” says Petty Officer 1st Class, Mark Faloon, also an EOD tech. “We are a team….we are quiet professionals.”

The movie irked a number of EOD technicians, but I wonder, is it less about stolen recognition and more about anonymity gone? To a group of private, stealth Macgyvers of the desert, perhaps it seems as if Kathryn Bigelow has gone and blown their cover.

“Everyone wants to be in our business right now because of this whole IED war that’s happening and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing,” says Canady.

When I had the chance to speak with Bigelow several months ago, she talked about trying to “unpack” the psychology of an EOD tech. “What makes them walk toward something you and I and the rest of the world would run from?” she asked.

Problem is, most EOD techs I’ve met over the past couple of years don’t want to be unpacked. Their conversations about their jobs are as fragmented as the stuff they scoop up post- boom. Showing the world what they do on a 30 x 70 foot screen may have felt like an invasion of privacy.

Bigelow told me that she and her crew felt a “heightened degree of responsibility” and were glad to have “an opportunity to honor these… heroic individuals.” She says EOD techs have “arguably, the most dangerous job in the world” and she hoped they felt her portrayal was done “with some care and compassion and sensitivity.”

Everyone would agree the James character was mostly Hollywood. One tech, Air Force Staff Sergeant Wayne Widner told me that sort of personality would not exist, or at least not for very long. “He’d be killed, or asked to change the way he does things.”

But that’s what makes people go to movies. And the Oscar will make more people see this movie. And the average plumber, lawyer, lobbyist, politician, beautician, mom or shop owner will know a little bit more about what’s at stake, how close the calls, and what sort of enemy the members of our armed services are facing.