INTERVIEW: Henry Hughes

Henry Hughes is a writer and director whose short film, “Day One,” is nominated for a 2015 Academy Award. The film is based on Hughes’ experience as an officer in the 173d Airborne Brigade during two deployments in Afghanistan, and his relationship with his Afghan-American interpreter, Ayman Aziz. Hughes and I spoke about his film, the art that comes out of war, and Bowe Bergdahl, for this article at Quartz. This is a rough transcription and probably full of errors I’ve made.

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THE ART OF WAR

Tim: What is it about this story? What was it about Aziz or that relationship that it was the movie you wanted to make when you got back?

Hank: I didn’t start with her, I started with myself, which is probably what everyone does when they are a young writer. You look at your life and the things that are important to you and you want to share that with people in hopes that it illuminates something. I tried that a few times with my own stuff, which is, I come from a long line of military tradition and I wanted to be a part of that narrative. I knew that going to war was a big part of that. I also knew that I wasn’t going to go to war to find some sort of answer or salvation or come back.

It seemed like once I put everything on the table of what my experiences were, and I’d seen that story a bunch of times and I didn’t think that it was illuminating anything new.

In fact I think a lot of the war genre it’s been pretty unchanged since World War I. It’s focusing around trauma and what it is to experience that both as the person inflicting it and the person receiving it. That was the social dilemma.

What I thought was so interesting about Ayman was that she didn’t join for any of those reasons. Her reasoning was she had very few options. She was essentially ostracized from her community. She was in an arranged marriage in Oklahoma. She’s an American and she found this as a way to move forward. I thought that was so interesting that you would leave something so extreme for something more extreme.

There’s something about that that’s just not the same young man’s journey. She has such inherent conflicts wherein I think you can put it down to that it’s going to be hard to tell the version of my story without irony. Basically, you know when you go in you’re going to see things and do these things. Her story, it doesn’t have to deal with any of that. It has it’s own freshness to it because she has so much inherent conflict, be it the gender issue or the nationality. That’s so much more powerful. The fact that how many times have you seen … what’s your favorite war movie? You love Lawrence of Arabia don’t you? We’ve seen it together. She’s Lawrence of Arabia.

Tim: It is a war movie, I don’t think of it as a war movie but you’re right.

Hank: What’s so interesting about Lawrence of Arabia you think?

Tim: It’s definitely the fish out of water aspect. The fact that he’s totally alone in this alien culture right?

Hank: I think so yeah. It’s repeated again in Dances with Wolves. I think when you get that new perspective it becomes an old thing in a new way and you get to see it for almost what it is.

Tim: One thing that I think is interesting about the movie, as it relates to a lot of the more recent war movies about Afghanistan and Iraq, is that it seems very specific to this generation because it’s about an interpreter. Obviously there were interpreters but I think never has it been so important — that communication. It kind of reminded me of “Hurt Locker,” almost, in that no other war have bomb technicians been so important.

Hank: We were conducting counter-insurgency trying to build a nation. That’s what we were doing there. Whether or not that’s what the army is designed to do is a whole other conversation but that’s what the army was doing or the military for that matter. All of a sudden your ability to conduct that mission hinged on your ability to communicate. Which is funny because you have — oh god, what is that phrase? I bet you even know it better than I do. Something about war is a loss of words or war is what happens when words fail. Something like that. [Ed. Note “When words fail, war begins,” Wilfred Funk.]

You have this breakdown of communication in previous wars but it happened prior to the engagements. Now, that’s the most important piece of it. I can’t communicate on the individual level or the social level, the government there, without this individual speaking for me. We’re not there to really get into firefights and all that stuff…without the interpreter you can’t have the mission.

Tim: What’s your favorite war movie?

Hank: What’s my favorite war movie? I should be able to say that right off the bat. I usually actually do respond with Lawrence of Arabia but I have to admit I think that’s somewhat cheating you know? It is a war film but it’s also so much more than that. It’s an adventure film. It’s the type of film we don’t make anymore. It’s like saying Dances with Wolves is my favorite war film because he happened to be a soldier. That’s not the case.

If we’re just going your basic war film probably the Thin Red Line. It’s not the kind of war film that I want to make but it is a war film that speaks to the soul of a warrior in ways that a lot of the other war films speak to the visceral quality of combat. I do miss the visceral quality of combat, but I presently am more concerned with my soul as a warrior and what happened and what I’m going to do with that and how it has changed, me as opposed to the very immediate quality of combat.

Tim: That’s a really good way to put it.

Hank: In terms of those other war films I can say that a lot of them are concerned with, I just had it, people finding their identity though combat, through a mission, through achieving something.

Of course, they’re action oriented but that’s a very military thing — can-do, man of action, or woman of action like in Zero Dark Thirty. It’s accomplishing things. It’s not thinking about things, it’s always ‘do.’ A good decision now is better than a great decision later. It’s like do, do, do. If you have a lot of these people doing these things that they almost build other personalities, when it comes to combat, between who they are and who they are perceived to be. I don’t know if my film has that. I think there is some identity stuff but it’s not wrapped around this hero trauma-ness.

Heroism is very interesting but I don’t think we’ve really talked about it intelligently in a long time. It’s kind of reduced it to — that heroism is also the same as being a superhero or heroism is a way to say everyone is special, everyone is a hero, everyone’s a snowflake. I would be interested in asking what actually is heroic but I don’t thing that a lot of those films are really asking that. I think they’re confusing heroism with maybe courage.

Tim: They want to find something to celebrate I think.

Hank: That’s actually — I think you’ve nailed it. It’s incredibly difficult and I think it’s why you see few war films and you see fewer successful ones. We like to go to the movies to find some sort of satisfaction. That can come in a few different forms but in a war movie it is very hard to find it especially in the present wars because we haven’t had any sort of finality in them or not even some sort of sign of success. Not success or final success. At the end everything was won or that we did good. That’s why it’s a lot easier to make a World War II movie. A little more cut and dry or at least the way we present them.

Tim: I have a list of movies that I want you to make in my head, I just read a book “Army at Dawn,” by Rick Atkinson, it’s the history of the North African campaign of World War II…it was written relatively recently and describing the US military interacting with Muslim people in Algeria and Tunisia and has so many weird echoes Afghanistan and Iraq….it struck me that looking back now perhaps it’s not as cut and dried as we imagine from the World War II films we have seen.

Hank: I always wondered — you have veterans from World War II who were really excited about Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. I think that they are great representations of that experience. Particularly Band of Brothers there is almost a nostalgic quality to it. [But] I wonder what World War II veterans would want to have seen or what they would have considered the highest truth five years after they came back, ten years after they came back, when you don’t have so much time in between them.

You see these veterans of World War I and World War II, there was a void and a darkness. Look at the authors that came out of those wars. There is some serious nihilism at times, pessimism. I’m not saying that they were right, I’m just saying that we kind of see these, quote “back-to -back World War champs” or something like that. It’s not really what happened.

I’m looking at my shelf right now. Thomas Pynchon…

Tim: I love Thomas Pynchon.

Hank: Yeah. Isn’t Gravity’s Rainbow, which is on my stack of books to read, isn’t that … I’m sure you’ve read it.

Tim: When you read it, it’s an absurdist book. It’s not inspired by any real person’s wartime experience, probably. It is reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut. It’s the same kind of thing — the only reaction to this madness is to be mad yourself. It is also super paranoid, the Pynchon thing, the suspicion of everyone working against you.

Hank: When they came back, the war for them had pulled back — it’s like it showed them the Wizard of Oz was an old man and that perhaps all these systems of democracy and righteousness weren’t exactly what they thought they were.

We’re seeing those versions — the early, just-out-of-the war versions of movies now are great books by like Phil Klay. He’s dark at times but it also can be very honest, and I do wonder how are we going to perceive these things later on. What is the narrative of the veteran that we’ll have 20 years from now?

Tim: Did you have any favorite books about Afghanistan or Iraq or other pieces of art beyond movies that take that up?

Hank: I think Phil Klay’s “Redeployment” is the Tim O’Brien of our generation. It is “The Things They Carried” of our generation. I think it’s incredible writing — he, in a very similar like Salinger, O’Brien sort of fashion, shows these short vignettes, which is very smart because it’s hard to encompass the entirety of a war time experience in a novel or the thrust of a movie in a story line that requires narrative arcs. Whereas in a short story you can get straight at themes and tones. So much of the hyperbolic combat experience is about that. I still haven’t finished the last story because I read it on the plane and I had to quit. It felt too honest and it felt inappropriate to be reading it on a plane. I couldn’t have the experience I wanted to have with it.

I’m trying to think is there anything else that I enjoy…his name is Karl Marlantes and it’s called “What It’s Like to Go to War.” He is a Vietnam veteran, quite decorated, a marine and he was an officer like myself. He has written this incredible book about the spiritual side of what it means to kill other people and to go into combat and the exhilaration of it and also this kind of, you know, out of body experiences that you can have leading people in an incredibly dangerous situation. He talks about living with that sort of, I suppose it’s trauma. He’s an older man now. He must be in his … I don’t know, he’s a Vietnam vet. How old are Vietnam vets?

Tim: Sixties, seventies probably?

Hank: Yeah. You know, we’re getting old too, shit. I really enjoyed that book. I thought that it cut right to the troubled soul of wanting to help but in using combat and violence to achieve that and how that weighs on somebody. I actually do like “Hurt Locker” a lot which is not a very popular thing to say as a soldier because their portrayal of tactics is … let me see if I can find a nice word here.

Tim: Not very accurate. Inaccurate.

Hank: Exaggerated. It’s distracting, actually, is what it is for anyone who’s been in combat. It’s hard for you to ignore some of those discrepancies because when you watch a movie you’re supposed to be in some sort of alternate reality that looks like, and hopefully feels like, your own.

Tim: It’s really interesting to hear you say that, because as obviously someone who’s not been in combat, I watch the Hurt Locker and think it is the strongest of the Iraq-Afghanistan war movies. I’ve also just saw American Sniper recently, which I thought was not actually that great of a movie. I feel like the depiction of what he was doing in a combat zone seemed absurd to me. It didn’t seem like things that the US military would actually be doing. I’m thinking of the part where he just sort of announced that he was taking a squad of people to go capture this guy and they just went and did it. But I don’t know.

Hank: What’s going on there is a few things. One of them is accuracy versus truth and which is more important. In my opinion, truth is always more important than accuracy. The problem is you might distance that military veteran crowd if you don’t have the accuracy. I’m okay with that because that means for Tim Fernholz and for the person who is not in combat or that person or that group of individuals is the majority, and maybe that’s what the movie-going experience is for.

I think that in terms of American Sniper and its … people have asked me a few times, “Aren’t there rules and protocol and so on?” Totally, there are. There’s also, as in anything else, exceptions to the rule. There are sometimes not nearly as much oversight as you might think. There are times when things go really crazy and really hectic and people just do things. There might not be any oversight.

That has certainly happened in my own experiences, where you go to tell another veteran about something and they’re like, “You did that? That’s something that happened?” It’s like, “Yeah.” It can just be absurd at times. It’s different when you’re watching because you’re like, “That would never happen.” It’s stranger than fiction, somehow. Real life, you know?

Tim: Especially in situations that are that extreme where there’s no status quo and so many different actors….

Hank: You’re also in situations where you don’t have a lot of time and the stakes are incredibly high and so sometimes that expresses itself in absurd scenarios. You just can’t believe that it happened. I’m trying to think of a good example that I can give to you from my own experience that would kind of relay that… I can’t talk about that story.

Tim: Well, now I’m interested! You can’t do that.

Hank: One I’ve spoken about before, we found four IEDs one day and it was getting dark and we knew that there were more. If we were going to continue into the dark searching for these things they were just going to find us. They were going to blow up. We circled the wagons and we just holed up overnight. We were literally waiting for enough light to find our way out.

We woke up in the morning and this motorcyclist, this local guy, just drove right by us. I was actually peeing, and I watched him go by. About a hundred meters down the road he blew the fuck up. And, you realize I should have said something to that guy. It wasn’t like it was intentional but that’s the sort of absurdist thing. It was like, “What if I hadn’t been peeing, I might have said something.” That slight oversight which has nothing to do with any sort of soldierly task or it’s not even something you’re trained for. It’s just a human thing. It’s a human oversight. Who forgot where they put their keys? I forgot to say something to the guy.

There was a very intense scenario when two sailors went missing. Kind of a Bowe Bergdahl scenario. We were just out for days, just dirty and that was the first time I ever got athlete’s foot. I was really starting to … clothes were falling off and tearing apart and such. You start to get — I think it’s battle fatigue; maybe it’s like a numbness.

I remember we met up with this other element. We met them, it’s called a hot LZ. They were in the middle of a firefight. We were in a helicopter and we jump in and I met up with them. The fire fight died down and there was this sniper. He was not my guy. I saw him and he said a few things like, “I got somebody.” I was talking to the other officer and in the back of my mind I was like, “What’s this guy talking about?” He was describing this guy. It doesn’t sound like it’s anything, like that they were just peeking around the corner. All of a sudden he takes the shot and you hear screaming 200 meters away.

In my mind, I was thinking, I was wanting to ask this guy, “Do you positively identify a weapon?” It wasn’t my…because it’s etiquette, I didn’t do that. The etiquette was for his officer to say that. That is absurd because…someone died because I didn’t use the right spoon for dessert. That is absurd.

I don’t remember seeing that kind of stuff in war movies. You see a bit in Hurt Locker actually. Hurt Locker’s good at that. That’s what Hurt Locker is actually really good at.

Tim: Weird dumb shit.

Hank: Yeah. It’s coming home and looking at 500 types of cereal and going, I want to go back to war. They distilled that so incredibly well that I, as someone who wants to make a film about a similar situation, I go, “I don’t know if I could ever best that moment. I don’t know if I could crystallize the experience of coming home into such…that was a reduction of everything. Despite all the discrepancies of Hurt Locker, how inaccurate their tactics were, that moment was the highest truth I think I’ve seen on the recent wars. At least what it was like to come home.

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SERIAL

Tim: Since you just mentioned it, Bowe Bergdahl, have you looked into the Serial episodes that have come out?

Hank: I have listened to the every episode twice. I am fascinated by that story.

Tim: I am curious what you think of that situation.

Hank: I’ll start with, I was in a similar situation wherein two guys went missing under…

Tim: A DUSTWUN? [The military term for “Duty Status, Whereabouts Unknown”]

Hank: Yeah it was a DUSTWUN, absolutely. We had already been out on a two week, maybe it was a week mission or something, and then we got extended two more weeks. It was the longest stretch I’d ever been out of the wire. We were getting resupplied, all the time, wearing the same clothes, the same situation I described earlier, where we started to get numb. I remember towards…at some point in all of that I remember thinking, “I’m an officer and I can’t say this to anybody, but fuck these guys.” It wasn’t that I was upset that I was out — it’s because that all of a sudden our area, this town, was disrupted by — so much mayhem came up here.

I’ve never seen so many Special Forces, so many helicopters, so many random units. What were these guys doing? Why did they just randomly leave their base? I got upset by it, and I knew that I couldn’t express that to anybody because that would just be immature of me.

Tim: Did they ever find those two sailors? Did that ever get resolved?

Hank: Yeah, they died. They were killed. I saw a video of it a few years later. I don’t mean to speak ill of them. I still don’t know why they left, under what circumstances. I know that there is a like — a mum is the word, sealed-lip sort of scenario. I remember really disliking them, and now I’m listening to Bowe Bergdahl and my first reaction to him was, as soon as I heard him speak in the first episode, maybe not as soon but after maybe a few minutes, I knew who he was.

The army attracts a very interesting crowd. My father and I talk about this. Why are there so many homeless veterans? What is the connection there? What is the chicken or the egg quality? Is it that people who have…more trouble in their life join the military because that is an easier path? I’m not saying that Bowe Bergdahl is a man who was that but I’m saying that there is something there.

Tim: There’s a kind of character who comes.

Hank: There’s a kind of character, yeah. You get a young man like Bowe Bergdahl was or the one he presented in his account of his time there, where he’s fantastic or he’s a daydreamer. He has grandiose visions of himself and what is right and what it wrong. He is righteous and is willing to do anything about it on some level, as we all found out; he found out too, I suppose. The part that distilled it for me, when I was like, oh I know exactly who he is, is when he leaves the base and he gets lost because he didn’t check his compass.

I don’t mean to begrudge the man, he has been through an insane amount of torture. I think that he should probably be found guilty of some things and I think they should give him zero days as his sentence. I think the man has suffered enough.

Tim: They’ve interviewed other people from his unit. It’s funny, I’m sure you recognized, when they’re talking about all the searches they had to do for him, it sounds so much like what you were just describing searching for those sailors.

Hank: That’s such a strange thing too about the military. When I was doing with our DUSTWUN, I was like, “What is so important about these two individuals?” I thought would we have done that during other wars? Would we have stopped everything that we were supposed to be doing to search for someone during the Battle of the Bulge?

Tim: I imagine that they would not do that.

Hank: Right. It speaks to — that’s because there was an existential threat for the Battle of the Bulge or the invasion of Normandy. Those were incredibly important things that … good reasons to go to war. So good that the outcome for the many is more important than the outcome for the individual. Why is it that in this instance we have swapped that? Why is the individual more important than the rest of society, to include the military, to include the Afghan, it just — why is one person so important?

Tim: Did it matter to you or to other soldiers in the sense that you would think, ‘If it was me out there they’d be doing this for me?’

Hank: I can’t speak for every soldier. For me I don’t know if I can say that without some sort of conditional arguments of like, ‘If I was lost because of an accident or because of some horrible situation, I get that, the desire for someone to look for me.’ I don’t know. This is what’s so interesting about putting yourself in a combat scenario is you have to ask these questions where you quantify the value of a life, many lives, many lives versus a life. Sitting here armchair quarterbacking it, I want to say that we should only be willing to go wars wherein we don’t care if one individual makes it back.

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THE POLITICS

Tim: When you were writing the main character, from the point of view of a woman and someone from a different cultural background from you, was that difficult?

Hank: Yes, is the short answer. I do not have the experience to fall back on on — what it feels like to be a woman surrounded by 40 infantrymen. I witnessed that, but I didn’t have the internal experience that she was having. I’m grateful that I was able to ask her many questions and she was open to answering them.

Some characters in the movie are the bomb maker and his wife. It was important to me that I showed that they were actually romantically in love. We often have this impression that a Muslim man is just trying to impregnate a bunch of Muslim women to have a bigger family or something like that.

My experience was, I saw a lot of Afghan interpreters and I was amazed at how much of their time, like my own, was occupied with thinking about women and thinking about them in a very poetic and romantic way. I was like, “What?”

You pre-suppose that they don’t have the Beatles or something. Love was a big part of their society as well and expressed differently, in other ways. That was interesting. Could I pretend to be a fly on the wall of what it was like to be an Afghan man in love with an Afghan woman? What I settled on was that humans have a few basic components that I think are across the board human, and then on top of that you have cultural influence.

Whatever I was starting, the genesis was from below the cultural influence, and not starting at the cultural influence. If I could just start at the base human need, of what this person needed, and then go, “Okay, now what is the cultural influence that would affect that?” I think that’s how you can find a true north of some sort there. I don’t think it’s the most accurate process necessarily but it was one that I think worked.

Tim: With debate in this country right now over Muslims and Muslim Americans and their role or not in the war on terror — when you made this, was any kind of political message in head?

Hank: I think that if you’re going to make a movie about politics you’re going to come up short. Maybe not about politics but with a political agenda. It’s pretty obvious when that happens and it feels like propaganda. My only goal was what to try and convey what it felt like emotionally to be in a combat zone and that there was a very hyperbolic quality, with extreme highs, in terms of it being visceral, of it being exciting, and extreme lows of self-worth. I want to say immorality but amorality at times. Maybe a breakdown of your moral code. I find that to be an incredibly human experience.

I knew that the main character that I had written, that she was a human. I didn’t see her as a Muslim. It’s a matter of, this is a human. I worked with a ton of Afghans who are also Muslim and they wanted many of the same things that I wanted. They are also a product of their environment just as I am. I joined the army because my dad joined the army because his dad joined the army. I made a decision when I was 17 years old. I’m not saying it was a bad decision I’m just saying that’s a decision a 17 year old makes.

Why does someone want to fight a soldier that’s deployed to their country? It’s probably because they’re young, making a very similar decision, based on their environment. It can’t just be reduced into this binary us versus them. As long as we continue to think about it in that simple terms we’re just spinning wheels. It’s not what it’s about at all.

Tim: I think there’s going to be a lot of appreciation for the fact that you looked at these experiences that you had and she had, and felt that the the interesting story is her.

Hank: For sure. I mean I totally think that in terms of courage, it takes a lot more courage to be her as a Muslim American woman surrounded by a bunch of infantrymen in Afghanistan than it is to storm up some sort of hill in combat. That’s sort of, intestinal fortitude.

Tim: Yeah it is.

Hank: You have to be from such a harsh starting point that she’s from to be able to find your own integrity and your own moral compass against … I was awarded so many times along the way with little Ranger tabs and Airborne wings and atta-boys.

Tim: Typical spoiled millennial.

Hank: She had none of that shit, man. She had to figure it out on her own what she thought was right. That’s courageous. Growing up your entire life thinking you’re going to be a soldier and risk your life, that’s not courageous, that’s just fulfilling what you were supposed to do, on some level. It takes a little bit of courage, don’t get me wrong, but nothing compared to finding your own way in the world and succeeding at it, with basically no one telling you what right is or that you’re doing a good job. In fact, most people are telling you that you’re an infidel and a traitor and females can’t do this.

The best part about it is she was never in your face about it or aggressive, although I’m sure she felt cornered for a large part of her life. She didn’t wear that on her sleeve at all, and that is insane to walk through life like that so elegantly. That’s one thing I find a little bit distasteful about a lot of the war picture stuff. It’s easy to aggrandize and glorify combat. It’s trying to find the real things that are tough in life and I think this is one of them.