In The Valley of Elah

The movie “In the Valley of Elah” is a movie about the old warrior Hank Deerfield who gets a call from the military that his son Mike, has gone missing from the base after returning from duty in Iraq. Hank drives to the military base in New Mexico to find out what has happened to his son. After a couple of days, the stabbed and dismembered body of his son is found not far from town. Hank gets good contact with the detective that works on his case and together, they try to find out what really happened with his son. Hank and the detective investigate and discover shocking things not only about Hank’s son, but also about the other men serving in Iraq and how they treated people who were suffering. In the end, it turns out that Mike’s three good friends from the base had gotten in to a fight with him and then killed him, without caring a lot about it. This is a movie that gives us an example of how mentally damaged you can get when you experience war, and how it gets you to that point where you no longer care about other people or their lives.  '

I really liked this movie. It was a lot of action and tension, but there were also some sad moments that made me connect with the movie. I thought it was really scary to see how war can affect soldiers and kind of dehumanize people. This is a movie I definitely would see again.

In Barack Obama’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway, he said “Still, we are at war, and I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill. Some will be killed”. In some ways, this quote is connected with this movie. We saw how the soldiers performed on duty in a distant land when nobody was there to see it. How they killed and hurt innocent people without even caring about the damage they had done. I would connect the quote mostly to Mike in the movie. He tortured and killed innocent people, and then he got killed. You could say that he got a taste of his own medicine. Barack Obama also said “The soldier’s courage and sacrifice is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause and to comrades in arms”. I do agree with the President on this. It is a huge sacrifice to risk your life for your country when you know that you can die any minute. So I hope there are not many soldiers that are so affected by the war that they act like the guys in this movie. There are too many innocent people that die in war, and there is no need to do more harm in this world.

This movie has given me a picture of how dangerous it is to serve in the war in Iraq. I understand that when you come from a safe and protecting environment at home, war changes your life and your perspective of things. I don’t think that a lot of the young adults that choose to serve and fight for their country at war know what they are going to face. It is honorable to fight for your country, but there are very few men and women that come back from war as the same person they were before they left. Some get mentally damaged, some get physically damaged and some get so damaged that they don’t come back at all.