Media Comment 1/14 – “First Kill”

I feel a bit like an animal right now.

I just watched a squirmy little Vietnam documentary called “First Kill,” an early oughts’ Dutch exploration of the experiences of combat veterans. Got me all charged up because it feels true, and it’s always exciting to see a documentary that seems to understand things as they might really be.

The fact that the film is also beautifully edited and produced is just icing.

I like it when things make me uncomfortable. We should all be uncomfortable more often, understand that life isn’t what we expect it is, that it’s stranger, that the depths of human psychology are deep and dark indeed.

There’s this moment in the film, a conversation cutting back and forth between a group of black marine veterans, when one of the guys talks about how going into combat lights up this whole part of your mind that you hadn’t even realized was there. That you wouldn’t ever understand unless you were to feel it for yourself. “We never left the jungle,” he says, in the sense that the jungle is there all along, buried deep, but there, that all the old instincts are sitting latent, awaiting a trigger.

I believe him. I’ve been in the jungle a few times now, not in combat, not for very long. If you put all the days together it wouldn’t be more than a couple weeks, but those memories are some the brightest and sharpest that I have. I can lose entire years of time, like my sophomore year of high school (I honestly don’t have a single coherent, specific image left in my head). But the Jungle sticks, frozen in time, hyper-real and tangible. It’s amazing how clearly the sound and the smells always come through when I think of it.

I need to comes to terms with the fact that the most memorable moments in my life have also been those of the greatest risk. I don’t mean to conflate any of the idiotic antics I’ve gotten up to to with the experiences of these veterans, more that there’s a dark part of me that feels an affinity for that addictive, twisted rush of adrenaline.That when the old tunnel rat looks up at the camera and says he misses it I can feel an edge of recognition shot through my revulsion.

Strongly recommend. It’s a good one, and it’s free.