‘Young Americans – The “Unwinnable” Ramadi Episodes’: Series Prologue And Episode 1: ‘Return To Ramadi’ (CONTENT WARNING)

by Pat Dollard

First of all, sorry for the delayed release of this, I got a few big ideas for some big changes, and technical issues that arose in the process prevented me from meeting the series debut date of the 5th. It was a nightmare, and more work could be done, and it’s sans a real final credit sequence, but it’s time to roll.  You get the basic idea here. There will be a different final version for DVD.  Combat sequences  in the prologue were shot by myself or Marines.

Series Prologue:

Episode 1: “Return To Ramadi”:

I was interviewing Michael Yon on my Blog Talk Radio show, “The Jihadi Killer Hour,” and we were discussing the fact that in many ways, Ramadi was the truest analogy of Afghanistan. The Iraq war hinged entirely on whether or not Ramadi could be won, as Al Qaeda needed it to control the rest of their recently established de-facto state, the Al Anbar province of Iraq. The shorthand is that we were told Ramadi, and therefor Al Anbar, and therefore Iraq, was lost, and it was time to get the hell out of what was almost literally the new Dodge, the wild west of western Iraq. Well, due to our tenacity and solid counter-insurgency plan, we won the hearts and minds of the citizens of Ramadi, and we won the war. But not before the Democrat political establishment killed many young Americans by encouraging the enemy to keep fighting by endlessly dangling the tantalizing promise of a forced media and Congress-driven surrender. There’s not much lower humanity than a person who will cost his country a war, (and in this case, the lives of those who have died in the fight that he has worsened and prolonged), for the sake of any personal gain, be it political, financial, whatever. There are people in Washington, D.C. who are guilty of treason, plain and simple. The court and laws of common sense certainly find this to be true – - I’ll leave it to the lawyers to jerk themselves off about the standards required to meet the actual legal definition. If you’re working for a defeat of your country, you’re a traitor. More on all of this, later.

The story of this project, the mainstream media whores and propagandists who tried to respectively fuck and talk it to death, is epic. I’ve decided not to go into it, despite the fact that just prior to writing this sentence I was well into an intricately constructed retelling of it all, using it as the essential element of a detailed analysis of all the larger issues it begged questions of, dove-tailed with, and stood as a microcosm of.

But fuck that, you don’t have all day and I’d rather not color what is about to unfold in the weeks ahead as the episodes of this series are presented here. ( I may serialize that longer piece in future posts). You’ll be seeing about 3-4 episodes a month, on an essentially weekly schedule.   I’ve got shrapnel embedded in a scarred body that endures the fading sight and hearing of war-damaged eyes and ears, so Big Hollywood is of the opinion that I’ve earned the right to roll these out how and when I want.  I’m grateful for that, and it is very useful creatively, so don’t expect a schedule any more rigid than “about weekly.” You can always click on my page to see whatever you might have missed due to the irregular schedule.  Each episode is very different in style, content and tone, and all work together to weave a final big picture.  This project started out as just a man alone with a camera he didn’t know how to use, and that’s almost entirely how it ended; it’s rough and unprofessional, because it’s just one of the world’s biggest home movies. I’ve designed it to be didactic by experience instead of  by lecture, so there are reasons why you’ll be dealing with limited information.  Primarily it’s because I didn’t know much more at the time events were happening than you will as you watch them unfold. We’re in this together.  Don’t be frustrated by feeling like you want more information, everything important that you want to know and are frustrated because you don’t, will come in moments or hours.

Here’s some short-hand background:  I was a William-Morris talent agent, a 17-year veteran with Steven Soderbergh as my flagship client.  I wasn’t restless, I wasn’t having a mid-life crisis, nor did I go for any other cheap reason that the Left would have you believe in order to prevent you from finding any decent, substantive or, God forbid, patriotic or moral reason to film what I did. I went because my country was engaged in both a shooting and information war, and if I could do it, I faced a moral imperative to serve my country in those wars, in the best available way that I could.  At the time, I was too old to enlist, so I joined the fray in the next most appropriate manner. In both the series and the story behind it, there are great heights of human achievement, the most stinging moments of human pain, the lowest depths of human failure and human evil, and loss of life of family and friends.  I went to war and kept my life, but lost my family, in a bizarre reversal of the usual dark process.  Someone recently told me that I have never come home.  And like so many of us who journey into war, I have found that this person was inadvertently correct.  Because I did come home, but home was no longer there.  It really never is, if only because the home we left was in part a no-longer effective illusion, and because our vision of the natures of both the world and the men who populate it, so stripped to their essential truths by conditions that are governed by nothing more than the forces of cunning and power, has been made much clearer, and so different, that home by perception is most certainly not, and never again will be, the place that we left. We will be entirely present, we will flourish, and we will start a new home with the people we left in the old one, but no one ever returns home from war.


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Posted Jan 12th 2010 at 5:02 am in Featured Story, Film, Media Criticism, Military | 59 Comments