Quotes of the Day

Natalie Maines was just warming up when, on March 10, 2003, 10 days before the Iraq invasion, the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks stepped up to the mic on stage at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire Theatre in London and said, "We’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas." In the vivacious new documentary Shut Up & Sing: Dixie Chicks, Maines is seen watching TV later in 2003 as George Bush opines on the Dixie Chicks boycott that sprang up in opposition to her comment. When he tells Tom Brokaw, "They shouldn’t have their feelings hurt just because some people don’t buy their records when they speak out," Maines explodes. "‘They shouldn’t have their feelings hurt’? What a dumb f---."

Was that another slip of the mouth, an impromptu word geyser for which Maines would soon have to issue a diplomatically worded clarification? Not hardly. With exquisitely brisk timing, she turns to the documentary camera and, as if exasperated with the ignorance of some hayseed who happens to be the Chief Executive, says, "You’re a dumb f---."

There ya go, down-home protesters and country music programmers. You got your red-state, red-meat headline: Dixie Chicks Lead Singer Calls President a Dumb F---. The pop country trio — with Emily Robison (fiddle, etc.) and Marcie Maguire (dobro, etc.) sawing and strumming up a storm behind Maines — already seems to be spending more time on NPR than on CMT. Now the only network to welcome them may be Pacifica.

Standing up for what you believe in, and being prepared to pay the price, is the theme of two fine new non-fiction films. Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck’s Shut Up & Sing had its world premiere this week at the Toronto International Film Festival, with the Chicks in attendance. Patricia Foulkrod’s The Ground Truth, which opened Friday in New York and eight other cities, and is available on DVD Sept. 26, details the harrowing experiences of soldiers in Iraq and after they returned home.

I wouldn’t for a second equate losing airplay for your new CD (which went platinum anyway) with losing a limb, your innocence, your mind or your life in a war. But both docs trace a similar journey: the awakening of political activism among young folks from the heartland who feel they must speak out against the war, come what may.

FERTILE GROUND

"I saw Top Gun when I was in eighth grade," says Marine Sgt. Rob Sarra, "and I knew what I wanted to do, I knew what I wanted to be. And then I saw a Marine when I was in high school. And I was like, that’s it! They’re mean, they’re tough, they got cool uniforms and chicks dig ’em." Sarra then recalls his interview with a recruiting officer. "‘Here’s the big book of all the opportunities you have in the Marine Corps. What do you want to do?’ Pushes it across the desk at me. I looked him in the eye and I pushed it back across the desk, y’ know, and I said, ‘No. I want to be a grunt. I want to blow sh-- up. That’s what I want to do.’" He snaps out of his reverie. "That’s what I got to do. I got to blow sh-- up."

Not every G.I. was as gung-ho as Sarra. In a no-draft America, young people joined the service to get into college, or out of the ghetto, and recruitment painted a grand canvas of career opportunities. Killing, getting killed — this was not part of the pitch. Basic training drilled the killing game into young brains. Teach them to treat the enemy as you would a sniper in Grand Theft Auto. Instill the reflex to fire at a moving target. Foster team spirit with marching songs. Instead of the golden oldie "I don’t know but I been told...," have them sing along with:

Bomb the village, kill the people,
Throw some napalm in the square,
Do it on a Sunday morning,
Kill them on their way to prayer.
Ring the bell inside the school house,
Watch those kiddies gather round,
Lock and load with your two-forty,
Mow them little motherf---ers down.

Charles Anderson, Petty Officer, U.S. Navy intones this doggerel grievously, as if admitting to a war crime. But he acknowledges its efficacy. "If you get a whole group of people singin’ this thing," he says, "it gets kinda catchy."

Iraq is called a war, but for the U.S. it’s really a police action (our official word for the Vietnam involvement). The idea is for the troops to patrol the streets and keep people alive — the civilian population, if possible, but first and foremost themselves. Since there’s no draft, and thus no readily renewable supply of manpower, the goal is to keep U.S. combat deaths down while scoring the maximum number of enemy kills. "It’s peer pressure," says Marine Sean Huze, "group killing." In basic training, the Infantrymen were taught to take this war personally. "You're not just killing another soldier... you're killing a family," says Herold Noel, of the U.S. Army.

From Vietnam we learned the basic rules of the guerrilla game: that the enemy doesn’t wear a uniform, that it might be a woman or child, that the battle line is anywhere — essentially, that there are no rules — which the various insurgencies have updated by killing many more of its countrymen than they have our soldiers. But you never know who’s going to detonate himself or herself in your vicinity, so it’s simple prudence to shoot first and check for I.D. later.

Prudent but, as The Ground Truth shows, imprecise. You are told about a woman who put a hand inside her cloak to pull something out and, with a split second to decide whether she’s friend or foe, gun her down — noticing too late that what she reached for was a red flag. Or you see a car approach. Chad Reiber, an Army ranger, says: "I engaged a vehicle with a 50-caliber machine gun and blew it up. It was a pretty big explosion. I learned they had gasoline and a checkpoint book. I remember laughing after I blew it up and then driving by and seeing burned flesh dropping off, on fire. None of us even talked about it. After it happened it was done, it was gone."

That tactic keeps a soldier alive for another day, but it doesn’t stop agonies of self-recrimination at night, or for many nights to come. Mary Nguyen, an official of the Veterans’ Administration in Dallas, quotes a poem: "Yes, the war is over. And over and over and over in my mind." They bring the war home with them, but often they’re not the people they were when they left — once a civilian, now a killing machine. "There’s an old saying," Nguyen adds. "If you’re a good soldier, you’ll be a bad civilian." Sometimes the transition is fatal. When Jeff Lucey came back from Iraq, his loving family noticed the change, his withdrawal inside his troubled skull. Within a few months, he had put a loop in a garden hose and hanged himself. Only death ended his nightmares.

I guess that many soldiers have returned from Iraq to resume normal lives. The Ground Truth shows that many others have come back dented or crushed. At the beginning of the film we see them testifying in closeup; later the camera pans back, and too many of them are missing a hand or a leg. "Just the other day," Army veteran Robert Acosta recalls, "this guy asked me, how did I lose my hand? And I told him I lost it in the war. And he said, ‘What war?’ And I said the war in Iraq. And he said, ‘That’s still goin’ on?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, dude, it’s still goin’ on.’"

Other wounds are invisible but palpable. The most common wound for returning soldiers is brain injury. Some of these, as in Jeff Lucey’s case, are undiagnosed. Other soldiers find that the military refuses to diagnose their lingering malaise as post-traumatic stress disorder. As they were not issued proper protective gear for their uniforms and their tanks while in Iraq, they are too often denied treatment for the wounds they suffered there and brought home with them.

The dozen or so main interview subjects in The Ground Truth are an attractive, articulate, thoughtful bunch; they make an American viewer proud they represented you abroad, and hopeful about the next generation of leaders. I wish that Huze and Sarra and a few others would run for Congress, to serve as the haunted, haunting conscience of the American grunt. "Many of us are realizing, the military, that fight wasn’t our fight," one vet says. "This is our fight."

The Ground Truth, which is the best film I’ve seen to emerge from the 9/11 attacks and the war that followed, is implicitly antiwar, I suppose. But it’s undeniably pro-troops — the ones who went to Iraq at the country’s call, and are now speaking out, demanding veterans’ rights, a simple appreciation of their service and its awful cost. Some might say that to criticize the country you fought for is conduct unbecoming an officer. Huze disagrees: "[If] I didn’t speak out about it, that would be unbecoming."

Spoken like a good soldier.

SHUT UP OR STAND UP

When Natalie Maines spoke out, opposing the war before it had started, it was at the very least a dangerous career move. (As their media adviser says of Bush in early April 2003, "He’s got a very high approval rating. The war couldn’t be going better.") The comment surely sounded like treason to many of her country music fans. In Shut Up & Sing we see a protester outside one of their concerts shouting, "Be proud of your country. Be ashamed of the Dixie Chicks." Another said of Natalie: "They should send her over to Iraq, strap her to a bomb and drop her over Baghdad." One patriot summed up the anti-Chicks sentiment: "Freedom of speech is fine... but not in public."

Part of the opposition must have come from sheer surprise — that political controversy would come from a group with such a friendly, chirpy name. (Dixie? Chicks!? It’s a double affront to political correctness.) And maybe they expected that the two other, older band members would disassociate themselves from Maines. Briefly, in the film, Emily has the attitude of the good student who doesn’t care to be kept after class because the bad girl mouthed off. "If anybody asks me — ‘I didn’t say it. Talk to her.’" But that’s not really an option. "We’re a sisterhood," Emily says. "We go through the good, the bad and the ugly all together."

It had been good for the Chicks. Their albums were top sellers, and six weeks before Shepherd’s Bush they had performed at the Super Bowl. But it got bad, and then ugly, in a hurry. The "ashamed" aside soured and angered their conservative fans. Not since 1958, when Jerry Lee Lewis mentioned during a tour of England that he had married his 13-year-old second cousin, had a country act returned from London in such disgrace.

"I just could not believe people cared what I said," Maines says in the film. But after issuing two statements — first a clarification, then an apology — within three days of the original blast, she got her feist back. When country star Toby Keith posted a doctored photo of her with Saddam Hussein, Natalie donned a T shirt emblazoned with the acronym F.U.T.K. (In the movie she sees an anti-Chick protester wearing another T shirt, one that reads F.U.D.C., and wonders, "Whaddaya have against Dick Cheney?") She also held onto her sense of humor when the death threats came. Read one: "Natalie Maines will be shot Sunday July 6 in Dallas. On the phone with her husband, she says, "I’ll call ya tonight if I don’t get shot." And when shown a photo of the threat suspect, he says she thinks he’s kinda cute.

Shut Up & Sing ricochets from the 2003 fracas to the 2005 recording of their new CD and up to this summer. It reveals the pressure on the group not only to keep their families together during the controversy but to come up with an album that will appeal to fans beyond their depleted core of country fans. The album did go to Number 1, the Chicks did make the cover of TIME , and instead of making the rounds of the Southern stations that wouldn’t play their stuff, they appeared on satellite radio with a clearly smitten Howard Stern. He takes their politics to heart, then asks the Chicks if it’s true they’re not wearing panties. Natalie, ever the crusader, says with mock defiance, "I will not wear panties till the war is over."

I can’t say how Shut Up & Sing will play in the heartland — or, for that matter, whether an old leftie like me would have been as charmed by the film if I didn’t share the group’s political sentiments. I’d like to think I’d respect their gumption and be charmed by their perseverance. The movie ends in June 2006, when the Chicks are back at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, the scene of the crime, with everyone wondering what incendiary remark Natalie will make this time. Let’s just say she replayed one of her greatest hits.

• Richard Corliss