Devin Crayton
27MAR2013
Not Enough Fluff
The military has always been a keeper of many secrets and things of that nature. Not only to protect the American people, but to protect themselves as well. The American people do not hear half of the stuff that threatens their lives every day, most likely for their own good. When people or things such as Wikileaks give away secrets of our military it is a big deal, and people are put into jeopardy. However there are exceptions military movies are the only things that are really accepted by the military to be released and talk about war stories. It has always been okay because there is a lot of fluff and wooing to get the audience of that movie to buy into what’s going on. The directors put random stuff in to make it seem like the things we do in the military are always fighting and killing people. Most of the stories that occur aren’t even true. However one movie that set off many alarms including mine was the Navy Seal Movie “Act of Valor”. In act of valor too much information was exposed and jeopardizes people’s safety and wellbeing. “The story is fictional however the weapons and tactics used are real” this line was on the opening screen of the movie. Even though it is just a select few words, it actually means so much. The fact that they are actually giving up real world tactics makes it pretty risky for our men out there in the field. It gives away secrets and techniques we use to get to our enemy and conquer our mission. It’s already hard enough as it is but by giving them an advantage like this makes it that much more difficult as well as dangerous for the men and women in the field to have a successful mission status. The thing about the weapons is that they will know what do and what we are going to use in certain situations. There is a scene when the SWCC boats come to rescue the SEALs from an island and they come screaming in with guns a blazing which caught the enemy off guard at that point. What’s to say that in real life and not Hollywood life, a SEAL operation goes array like that one did and they need an emergency pickup like the one depicted. The enemy now knows what is going to happen and now they have a chance to be prepared. The scene before this happens is when the SEALs are sneaking up on the little camp site that was owned by the enemy. You see them sneaking in underwater, setting up snipers, taking people out and all other sorts of cool stuff. However for something that is coming out into the media for the world to see, one might not want to put up how they do what they do it is just entirely too risky and goes back to what I said earlier about putting many lives in danger.
I read an article that said a Retired Lt. Gen. James Vaught who was once an army delta force commander had put the admiral in charge of special operations on blast. He pretty much told the admiral he was a fool for making a movie about what they do, he said that they were just using it for recruiting and didn’t think of the consequences and repercussions that would come with making such an exposing movie. One of the main quotes that he said that stuck with me was “Since the time when your wonderful team went and drug bin Laden out and got rid of him … they’ve been splashing all of this all over the media … Now I’m going to tell you, one of these days, if you keep publishing how you do this, the other guy’s going to be there ready for you, and you’re going to fly in and he’d going to shoot down every d— helicopter and kill every one of your SEALs.” Those strong words are coming from someone who completely understands what is going on here. We cannot have people exploiting what our most secretive branch in our navy is doing it completely defeats the purpose.
The names of the SEALs were not released to