HBO recently began airing the film Collateral Damage. I watched it last night.

In 1999, having published a number of columns against US intervention in Colombia, I was contacted by Mike Gray, one of the screenwriters for The China Syndrome, who was working on an article for Rolling Stone on America’s "Drug War." He was looking for a few quotes to include from the Special Forces whistle blower. We continued to correspond off and on by email and an occasional phone call.

In early 2000, I had made up my mind to resign from my position as the Organizing Director of a Southern regional non-profit. Mike happened to call just as I was facing the angst of a formless future, and asked if I would be interested in working as the military technical advisor for a feature film.

My first reaction was not "no" but "hell no." I despise most war films. When he said it was going to feature Arnold Schwarznegger, that was all I had to hear. I wanted no part of yet another ubermenschen blood-drama. The only war movies I could remember in any way appreciating for years had been Platoon, which was made by a former grunt, and The Thin Red Line, which I regard as a humanist masterpiece.

But a week later, I received a call from Theresa Tucker-Davies of Chicago Pacific Entertainment, on behalf of Andrew Davis, a director of action films with a whiff of social commentary, who had hit the big time a couple years earlier with The Fugitive. I expressed my reservations, but she insisted I at least give him a chance and told me he would call the following day. Theresa is a pit bull at what she does, and I capitulated.

Andrew... Andy... called the next day, exactly on time. He pitched the film to me, hard. It was to be set in Colombia, where the protagonist, a fireman, would set out on a quest for vengeance after a bombing killed his family. But here it would depart from the usual Hollywood morality play, and our hero would find himself confronted with huge contradictions. The guerrillas upon whom he was bent on avenging himself would be playing a protective and often benevolent role, in many cases against the very forces with which the CIA, represented by a renegade agent, was aligned.

Andy wanted me because there was not a single other military advisor around with experience in Colombia, with an insider’s knowledge of the gray universe of US foreign policy, and whose perspective was that of someone opposed to US intervention in Colombia. I could learn a lot, he reiterated again and again, and I would work for him and only him.

Andy was on a mission. He, like Mike Gray, was incensed by the "Collateral Damage" of the so-called drug war, both abroad and at home, where we were reaching for the number 2,000,000 for rates of incarceration. In fact, that was what he wanted to name the film, Collateral Damage. He felt that he had enough of an insider’s knowledge himself, of Hollywood, to use a studio feature, starring one of the darlings of proto-fascism, to take a(n admittedly) liberal swipe at the "drug war," and at the menacing developments of US policy vis a vis Colombia.

This was not a position that mirrored my own on the situation in Colombia, but it was better than most. Moreover, I was facing unemployment, had no idea where I wanted to go from there, and I was a little intrigued by the whole prospect.

"How much does it pay," I asked Mike later when I called him back. Mike checked around, then told me to ask for $3,000 a week and expect $2,500.

He was exactly right. I’d never made that kind of money in my life. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t influence my decision.

Suddenly, I was working for Warner Brothers. I did learn a lot.

I learned that film people work like animals, and that a typical week can be over 70 hours. I learned that the movie industry is more hierarchical and more despotic than, say, the 75th Ranger Regiment. I learned that management in that industry is a class of people who would walk over dead bodies to move up, and that they will kiss ass with the same enthusiasm. Never in my life have I encountered such absolute social darwinism. The stress levels are through the roof, and the pastimes reflected it; sex and drugs and rock-and-roll, baby. It’s sadder than it sounds. No one is happy. There are no friends, only associates – just like combat. In fact, it’s a lot like the military, even including the hurry-up-and-wait syndrome.

There are also some world-class talents there, in every field. I can’t even begin to list them. Hollywood wants the best and they shell out the bucks to get them.

My job was wide-ranging. I wrote dialogue, developed combat scenes, critiqued the script again and again, consulted with set designers, costumes, props, special effects, stunts, and stayed in Andy’s hip pocket.

We set up and shot for four months on location in the gorgeous Mexican State of Veracruz, between Xalapa, Coatepec, and Xico. I sent money home to pay off debts and lived off my per diem.

And I argued. And I lost more than I won.

My own notion of realism was stubbornly resisted by everyone. This was the biggest lesson I would learn. Anything that might cause the audience to turn away for any reason impacts the bottom line. What Hollywood does is pander. It’s the most sophisticated pandering in the world, and it panders to the public instincts closest to the surface. The big paychecks are near the surface. Self-reinforcing stupidity for self-expanding capital.

There were other fights. The producer, Hawk Koch, provoked daily shouting matches with Andy over schedules, in which he had a direct financial interest, and politics. He worked as the studio’s stooge, in my opinion, and his secondary mission was to pressure Andy, who had artistic control written into his contract, to excise every crumb of social and political criticism from the production. He would even get on his cell phone from the location and tattle to the studio execs... that Andy wouldn’t do what he said, that this was turning into a left-wing propaganda piece (a ridiculous accusation). Koch was a big Democratic Party contributor, and his boy Al Gore’s family has significant investments in Occidental Petroleum, which hires death squads in Colombia to protect their investments there.

When the sets were dressed, every scene with the guerrillas was backgrounded with portraits of Che and Lenin. This made me very queasy. It should have. But I was getting paid. If I didn’t do it, someone else would... right?

Part way through filming, Andy got the bright idea of casting me. When something got into his head, dynamite wouldn’t get it out, so I suddenly found myself acting in a small speaking part as the CIA agent’s mercenary leader.

When the location shoot was finished and I’d gone home, we were called back to Los Angeles in July. The sound was fucked up, and the whole cast was sent to a "looping" studio, where we voiced over ourselves for the entire film.

While I was there, Andy had me write yet more dialogue, which was re-written and re-submitted almost in its original form by two guys who got $30,000 a week (!) for plagiarizing my stuff. I struggled with Andy against the idea of introducing a scene wherein Cliff Curtis’ character, the head guerrilla "terrorist," Claudio, who had until then retained a few human qualities to enhance the moral ambiguity of the film, was to execute an incompetent subaltern by sliding a live snake down his trachea. It’s an idiotic idea, not to mention probably impossible, I told Andy. I told him for the twentieth time that the initials in Spanish for Army of Colombian Liberation are not ALC. That never changed. Never overestimate the American audience.

I also got to watch the finally edited film. The only thing left to do was add music.

I wasn’t happy with the film, but it did at least retain its original sense of critique of US foreign policy, barely. Sort of a pacifist agnosticism... everyone is being violent and perpetuating the cycle of violence, guerrillas and the CIA are morally equivalent... you get the picture. Can’t we just all get along? I’d fought for any change I might force into the film, even as – to my increasing chagrin – it was doing exactly what these films do – pandering to the popular prejudice without offending the ruling class too much.

Colombians were human, however. Very human. The most sinister people in the film, aside from Cliff’s Claudio the terrorist, were CIA hires, including Elias Koteas’ character as renegade CIA agent (of course he had to be a renegade), Peter Brandt.

It was a job, and I’d gotten paid, and I wasn’t overly ashamed of it. Work is work, I rationalized.

It was due out October 4, 2001. Then some Egyptians and Saudis – at least according to the official story – flew hijacked passenger jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Explosions, fire, firemen, terror, shock... the images of a national trauma, recycled endlessly for weeks by the infotainment media, were entirely too similar to the images in the film. The decision was made to postpone its release until at least February of the following year.

I relaxed about movies and entered the antiwar movement with a vengeance.

Being former military had almost become a job description. I was wanted by film makers. Now I was wanted by antiwar committees as a kind of trump card to play against military chauvinism. They not only had a veteran, they had a Special Forces veteran. I am conflicted to this day about that role, but I contribute where I can, and me being comfortable is not the goal of the movement.

When Collateral Damage was released, my family got excited. We are not above being caught up in the novelty of one of us appearing in a movie. So on the third night it played in Raleigh, Sherry, Jeremy, Jayme (Jessie was in Fayetteville), my niece Angie, and I went to the Raleigh Grande to see it.

What I saw bore little resemblance to the edited film I had seen in July. When I left the cinema, I was ashamed and depressed. The 9-11 delirium had struck Collateral Damage.

The stupid snake scene was in. Fully twenty minutes had been cut and replaced by new special effects... more fire, more explosions. Cliff’s character had been transformed from a bitter schoolteacher turned guerrilla into a cold-blooded monster – real Hollywood cardboard fare. Extra scenes had been shot after July to ensure this. Footage that humanized Colombians had been drastically cut, converting them into a kind of xenophobe’s fantasy – an untrustworthy, innately deviant mass. A scene in which the paramilitaries had massacred a village – a common occurrence in the real Colombia – had been dubbed over to say the guerrillas had committed the atrocity. Elias’ CIA agent had been transformed from a calculating cynic to one of the merely misguided, almost an object lesson on the necessity, post-9/11, of killing a certain number of these (innately untrustworthy) civilians to root out the terrorist evil. What had begun as a lukewarm liberal critique of US policy in Colombia had been transformed – and not by any collaborative design between Hollywood and Washington (as Blackhawk Down was) – into yet another chauvinist blood-orgy. Andy knew he would never direct another feature film if he didn’t pander. The studio knew where its interests were. The system was just adapting itself.

Cliff, who has very progressive instincts, a Maori from New Zealand who often asked me about the liberation struggle in Colombia, called one night agonizing about what to say to reporters and interviewers after the attacks. He was torn between career and conscience. I didn’t feel qualified to advise him. I had continued to get paid and waded right out into the swamp. Who the fuck was I?

I was ashamed for days. I emailed Theresa and told her how despondent the whole thing made me feel, how betrayed, how ashamed and afraid I was that my friends would see this hideous bastardization. She wrote me back and said she was sorry "my heart was broken," and that Andy’s would be broken by my disapproval. Pure Hollywood.

Mistakes make us smarter. I should know.

Studio films are ideological commodities. They are the most powerful of the ideological media in my opinion. That’s why even this little misadventure has only served to reinforce my philosophical allegiance to the left.

The superstructural film automatically exchanges signals with the economic and political core. They adapt themselves to one another seamlessly. That’s why they call it a system. And when violent revenge is the pretext for re-structuring the world, it goes up on the silver screen.

This has to count as my official apology. I fucked up. I’m sorry.