US News
11/21/05
The Making of a Toy Soldier
Two months after the 9/11 attacks, Army Capt. Jason Amerine and his
Special Forces A-team crossed into Afghanistan with the mission of
fighting the Taliban with the forces of Hamid Karzai, then a
virtually unknown Afghan leader. Amerine worked with Karzai to plan
an assault on the Taliban's Tarin Kowt stronghold. Within days, the
small American team, keeping the reluctant Afghan fighters at their
side, seized Tarin Kowt, the provincial capital, and then used
airstrikes to repel a Taliban counterattack. The fight brought
Karzai an important military victory, one that helped propel him to
prominence.
The story of Amerine's work with Karzai will be brought into the
homes of America's youth next year, when the Army puts out a
plastic action figure of Amerine and gives him a starring role in
the America's Army video game. Now an Army major and an assistant
professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Amerine has
been a consultant on the game and helped make its Special Forces
expansion more realistic. "We didn't want this to appear
propagandist," he says of the game. "We wanted to show what we did,
and I think we came up with a realistic game." But, Amerine
expresses some ambivalence about being thrust before the public as
an action figure and video game character. By the very nature of
the toy, an action figure puts the focus on a single soldier, an
emphasis at odds with an Army ethos of teamwork. Still, Amerine
thinks of the figurine as another way to honor the three members of
his team who were killed by an errant U.S. bomb Dec. 5, 2001. "They
are the ones that this should represent," he says. "I wanted my men
to be remembered for what they did."
How to handle the stories of war heroes who have been killed is a
bit sticky. The Army is not exactly sure yet how they will tell
Amerine's story and how much detail they will include. And for now,
the Army is not planning to issue a figure of the Iraq war's only
Medal of Honor winner, Sgt. 1st Class Paul Smith, who was killed
near the Baghdad airport repelling an Iraqi Republican Guard
counterattack during the 2003 invasion.
Amerine himself feels it is important not to sanitize the stories.
The toys are meant to help with recruiting, of course, but Amerine
notes that potential soldiers should not join without considering
the risks. The power of this project, he says, lies in the fact
that the heroes being portrayed in the game and in the toys are
real people. "These weren't superheroes who had bullets bouncing
off of them," he says. "Some of us died. Some of us were crippled.
You see real human beings who fought for their country and
suffered." -Julian E. Barnes
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/051121/21heroes.b.htm