We All Could Have Been Heroes

In the new movie “Behind Enemy Lines,” an American pilot and navigator are shot down over the former Yugoslavia, with the pilot summarily executed by Serbian soldiers. That one combat death is one more than all the combat deaths suffered by all U.S. forces in the Balkans, according to the latest Pentagon tabulations.

Why? Because since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. government has never been willing to risk American lives for a cause that didn’t directly engage American vital interests.

“Behind Enemy Lines” portrays American heroism in Yugoslavia. The real story there was American abandonment.

Not a single U.S. soldier showed up on the ground in the former Yugoslavia until December 1995, nearly half a decade after the war began, in the summer of 1991. Even then, U.S. deployment commenced only after the Dayton peace accords guaranteed a “permissive environment” for our forces.

Indeed, the spring 1995 downing of U.S. flier Scott O’Grady, on which “Behind Enemy Lines” is loosely based, is the closest we ever came to incurring an actual casualty.

So what’s wrong with that? Zero casualties sounds like the best possible outcome, a perfect game. But unwillingness to risk casualties means unwillingness to go into “nonpermissive environments” and do jobs that need to be done.

Do the movie’s brave American soldiers show up to save the screaming victims of the brutal massacre at Srebrenica, to intercept a school bus filled with terrified teenage girls bound for a rape hotel or to liberate the caged inmates of the notorious Serb concentration camp at Omarska? Of course not. The American military action in “Behind Enemy Lines” is all directed at rescuing an American, the surviving navigator (played by Owen Wilson).

In an interview before the movie was released, director John Moore told The Times (“A War’s Sharp Shooter,” by Gina Piccalo, Nov. 28): “I felt obsessed about researching [the war in Bosnia].... It was so enticing and appalling at the same time.” Then why not make a movie about it? Why not open with a young Bosnian woman testifying behind a screen at the Hague Tribunal, then flash back to her last days as a quiet chess-playing teen before being kidnapped, gang-raped and forced into sexual slavery? Or about Drazen Erdemovic, the young Croat press-ganged into a Serb unit, who told the Hague Tribunal that he had shot “no more than 70” Bosnians point blank at Srebrenica--and that his platoon leader said if he refused, he could “line up” with them? Or Dusko Tadic, the first man convicted by the Hague Tribunal in an international war crimes trial since World War II? He was accused of forcing one prisoner to bite off the testicles of another.

American soldiers themselves are not to blame. Wilson’s hero in “Behind Enemy Lines” itches for action, yearns to “punch Nazis in the face.” Many real-life U.S. troops were no doubt eager to kick open the doors of basement dungeons, rescue trembling victims and apprehend their cowardly tormentors. But the dominant U.S. ethic of avoiding casualties at any cost gave them no opportunity to do so.

What could give them that opportunity is a provocative emerging idea: an all-volunteer United Nations Rapid Deployment Force.

National military forces are dispatched into harm’s way only when there’s something at stake for that nation. The prevention of crimes against humanity requires armed forces whose mission is to protect the interests of humanity. The soldiers in a U.N. force would be volunteering to protect not any national vital interest but the “global vital interest” in a world free of abominations like Yugoslavia. It would be rapidly dispatched to put a stop to such crimes. Its very existence might even deter them from erupting in the first place.

The idea has been endorsed by numerous members of Congress and foreign leaders such as Czech President Vaclav Havel; Oscar Arias, former president of Costa Rica and winner of the Nobel peace prize; and Jacques Delors, former European Commission president and ex-finance minister of France. And U.S. House Resolution 938 seeks to employ the American “voice, vote and influence” to move the U.N. to establish such a force.

“You wouldn’t know the first thing about serving your country,” says Gene Hackman’s admiral to Wilson’s irreverent hero in “Behind Enemy Lines.” But citizens ought to be able to volunteer to do more than serve their countries. Citizens ought to be able to volunteer to serve humanity.

So who knows? Maybe a few years down the road, John Moore and Owen Wilson will make a movie about heroic U.N. commandos--they could even be American volunteers--parachuting into treacherous “nonpermissive” environments, kicking the butts of some really, really bad guys and saving innocent people from really, really horrible fates. Only this time they’ll be rescuing the real victims of real crimes against humanity. Rather than just rescuing ourselves.

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Tad Daley is a visiting scholar at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations. In the spring of 2001, he ran for Congress in a special election to represent Los Angeles and Culver City.