Reporter's Notebook

Chatting with the sarges

I finally caught up with Sgt. Jeremiah Workman and Staff Sgt. David Bellavia between screenings yesterday. I wanted to know how they felt about the festival, and who they think the real audience for these movies is.

To Workman, the GIFF is “a chance for us to come together as veterans and hang out with each other, but also, there’s not enough stuff like this going on. We know how Hollywood is.”

I told Workman, who is still an active-duty Marine, that I hadn’t seen many active-duty troops at the GIFF, excepting those who were the subjects of the various films.

“It would be nice if we had more active-duty guys out here,” he said. “Maybe they just didn’t get the word, didn’t trickle down. But I think this something for the public, the civilians that are confused about the war and all this and that. Put all that aside, and come out here and let’s honor these veterans.”

He added, “I’m still on active duty, so for me to come out here and hang out with some of the retired guys and the old timers, it’s just good for the heart and soul.”

Workman also brought up something that doesn’t always occur to a civilian like myself: The GIFF is a guaranteed safe-haven. “You come here, you feel more welcome. You’re around people who have chewed the same dirt as you. We’re all here for the same [reasons]. There’s nobody out here protesting.”

Bellavia, who showed in yesterday’s war stories panel that he’s still very emotional about his combat experience, said that the GIFF had been therapeutic in a couple of ways.

“It’d be one thing if [the festival] was just about Iraq and Afghanistan,” Bellavia said. “But finding out that even though [since] Korea and World War II and Vietnam, so much has changed, but so much is the same.”

Bellavia is also happy to see “soldiers and Marines and veterans of my war, of our war, doing something” by turning their experiences into films. The documentaries “Outside the Wire,” “Brothers at War” and “This is War” all impressed him for that reason.

He liked “Outside the Wire” especially for portraying a little-known but large-scale gunfight in Afghanistan. “There’s guys right now in Afghanistan and places we don’t even know about, and they’re going through things that we went through,” he said “So the profile [of their actions], even though it’s not high, it just shows what kind of warrior we have out there.”

Bellavia thought the audience that needed more representation at the GIFF was that of civilians. Only by seeing films by and about troops will civilians realize “there’s no policy in this,” he said. “It’s just about what people are enduring, and they’re enduring on the behalf of civilians.”

Bellavia is running for Congress right now, but not primarily on his veteran status.

“I don’t think that veterans, when we come home, we necessarily have to put that up front: ‘Vote for me because I’m a vet, vote for me because I did something,’” he said. “I think that … the fires of conflict breed leadership that is conducive to statehouses and government.

“I’m running against another veteran, on the other side of the aisle, and I think it’s great. We both have different perspectives, we both earned those perspectives.

“I’m running on economy, I’m running on jobs, I’m running on issues that matter, but I have the experience of being there and doing that. So if you’re gonna talk about the Iraq War, why not have a veteran do it? I think that’s what the national dialogue should be.”