A lot of the films we discuss on Friendly Fire are set specifically in or are closely related to or about the fallout from the Vietnam War.

And one curious aspect of American exceptionalism is the belief that the United States is the only country to have, quote, their Vietnam.

Yes, didn't you know it is we, the USA, the only country in the world that has the sheer GDP,

the manpower, and the gluttonous political appetite for that very special kind of war, the quagmire.

Giggy!

But it only takes flipping through the pages of a high school level history textbook as long as that book is distributed in a well-funded school

district without a Texas-style school board stacked with revisionist history know-notings,

to see that these kind of country to country rock fights are everywhere.

The 2000s has the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 90s, had also the United States

in Iraq, in the 80s, Russia had Afghanistan in the 70s.

We had Vietnam. In the 60s, Israel had and continues to have Palestine, and in the 50s there was the Algerian War, a

battle for independence between Algeria's National Liberation Front and their colonizers

from France. Inspired in some degree by the Vietnamese

struggle for independence from France. Now this conflict was a difficult one for me

to learn about because I'm such a francophile that the

suggestion that the French could do any wrong is hard for me to cope with. But I

think that's the real strength of a project like friendly fire. It can lead me to

see that it's possible for even the French to do bad things as unlikely as that may seem

Anyway, the war between France and Algeria had been preordained back in the 1800s with the original French invasion of

Algeria in 1830. Their scorched earth policy that included massacres, mass

rapes, and other atrocities is just something you don't forget about as a country,

and Algerians did not.

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