If “war is hell,” as Civil War General William Sherman famously counseled, the never-ending Afghan conflict is America’s longest burning inferno.
Oscar-nominated writer/director Dan Krauss’s The Kill Team is set in Afghanistan’s Kandahar Valley and inspired by the Maywand District murders, where a squad of out-of-control U.S. soldiers committed war crimes from 2009 to 2010. The film’s infantrymen are led by Staff Sergeant Deeks (Alexander Skarsgård, who has effectively played other creeps, including a vampire and abusive husband, respectively, in the HBO series True Blood and Big Little Lies), an Iraq War veteran with macabre tattoos supposedly memorializing his Arab kills.
The chilling Deeks is a cross between the renegade Green Beret Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Apocalypse Now and Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger) in Oliver Stone’s 1986 Platoon. Just as Martin Sheen and then Charlie Sheen counterpointed Kurtz and Barnes in the above-mentioned Indochina epics, two dogfaces in Kill try blowing the whistle on their comrades-in-arms in Afghanistan (the movie was actually shot in the Canary Islands).
When it’s brother versus brother, what’s a conscientious volunteer to do?
First, Marquez (Brian Marc) attempts to report his squad members’ hashish smoking. Then the film’s protagonist Andrew Briggman (Nat Wolff) seeks to turn the men in for murdering unarmed Afghan civilians. But as many whistleblowers discover, going through the chain of command is cumbersome. As the beleaguered Briggman learns, well-connected Deeks “has ears everywhere.” Deeks even seems to learn about Briggman’s instant messaging to his stateside father William (Northern Exposure’s Rob Morrow), imploring his ex-Marine dad for help.
For their troubles, Marquez is brutally beaten by his fellow GIs, and Briggman is subjected to threats and intimidation. In a particularly suspenseful sequence, members of Briggman’s squad lure him to a firing range for target practice, as his suspicions grow that he’ll become the target. Later, Deeks devilishly shows Briggman a wooden box containing severed, withered fingers—grim souvenirs of the sadistic sarge’s lethal encounters with Afghan and/or Iraqi suspects.
Like Apocalypse Now and Platoon, The Kill Team illustrates how Washington’s endless imperialist wars of aggression tragically pit Americans against not only overseas “enemies,” but one another. Briggman and Marquez are caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. On the one hand, they’re fighting against jihadis, dodging IEDs, and ducking sniper fire. But on the other hand, they’re waging war against their own “brethren.” When it’s brother versus brother, what’s a conscientious volunteer to do?
The Kill Team, which arrives in theaters just as an impeachment inquiry triggered by whistleblowers dominates the news cycles, is inspired by a true story about a group of Army specialists deployed near Kandahar. These events also motivated Krauss to produce an award-winning 2013 documentary of the same title.
Whereas the 2013 nonfiction version focused on the trial and interviews with two of the soldiers involved, Army Specialist Adam Winfield and Private First Class Justin Stoner, the models for Briggman and Marquez. Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs, the model for Deeks, who was sentenced to life at Leavenworth, refused to go on camera.
Krauss’s achievement is cinematically singular in that he directed both the nonfiction and fiction treatments of the same subject.
While this is not the first time that a documentary film has been dramatized as a scripted feature film, Krauss’s achievement is cinematically singular in that he directed both the nonfiction and fiction treatments of the same subject. The nonfiction The Kill Team won the Tribeca Film Festival’s Best Documentary Feature and the San Francisco International Film Festival’s Golden Gate awards.
The 2019 fictionalization loses none of the original’s power, as themes such as the futility of war and America’s overseas imperial adventures remain all-too-contemporary. As Stoner put it back in the 2013 doc: “Your job is to kill. Then why the hell are you pissed off when we do it?”
Six years later, the war in Afghanistan rages on, with no end in sight. It takes its place among other military follies—like invading Iraq without finding those WMDs and Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds in Northern Syria—that affect the morale and mental health of our men and women in uniform. The Kill Team sheds light on this and more, proving General Sherman’s eternal edict.
The Kill Team opens in theaters and on demand October 25.