You don't need to watch the State of the Union to know that the nation is at the boiling point over this war -- I
Tivo'd all the Sunday talk shows where the "surge" and the opposition
to it dominated even Hillary versus Obama presidential news. Clearly, after a deadly weekend where 28 U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq and a deadly Monday where twin bombings killed over 100 Iraqis at a marketplace, it does make us all think back and wonder, "How the hell did we get to this miserable place?" {Photo: Ahmad Al-Rubayel / AFP - Getty Images}
We debate why the war planners didn't plan for this, and wonder if maybe we would even have done a better job. In my case, I think I would have anticipated this growing disaster if I'd been given the task. I've even got something that passes for "proof." Because, you see, I actually did get paid to think about the future of Iraq before the war happened.
In 2002, while the war drumbeats out of Iraq were only being heard in the distance, I pitched HBO a TV series that would be set in Afghanistan at the fictional military base "Camp Big Stick." It would deal with a company of soldiers, including a group involved in psy-ops, and would be called "Hearts and Minds."
HBO works differently than the broadcast networks. Rather than order a pilot first, they ordered a "bible" about how the series would work. The executive explained the theory as being how they already knew I could write a great pilot, they wanted to know how the series would work once I had done so. Of course, it's also cheaper to order a bible than a full pilot script. So, at HBO, they would read the bible then, if they liked it, they would order the pilot script.
Frankly, I didn't care how they wanted to do it. This was the home of "The Sopranos" and the chance, as a writer, to work at such a great place meant everything. I don't think there's a one-hour writer in Hollywood who doesn't dream of having a hit HBO series.
So during 2002 I worked up a 60-page bible about these soldiers, fresh off of 9/11, trying to do their jobs in Afghanistan. I turned it in and HBO liked it enough to order a full one-hour pilot script. The focus slightly shifted, leaning away from psy-ops to military intelligence, although it was really just a matter of emphasis. As I began to work on that pilot, however, the talk of war with Iraq grew louder and louder, and it became clear that, unless Saddam blinked, it was going to happen. I called the HBO executive in charge and asked if maybe, given this reality, the pilot should now be set in Iraq instead of Afghanistan. Her response was, "I don't know, you're the writer."
Well, God bless her. At a broadcast network, it's 99% likely the answer would have been that they would bring it up at the next development meeting and get back to me. HBO's idea was to let writers create and then to decide after they had done whatever they were going to do whether or not it would go to series.
And so I wrote about Iraq. Since it was now my decision, I decided that Iraq was going to be where the action was. Time frames in TV, though shorter than films, are still long. My challenge was not a small one:
I had to write a pilot about Iraq that would take place almost a year after the war was over, but I had to write it while the tanks were still on their way to Baghdad.
It was like shooting at a moving target. I made certain assumptions. The first was that the script be neither pro or anti war, but deal with the people who were there and their lives. The second was that, regardless of the intentions behind the war, it would still be messed up there. Here's a snippet of dialogue that has proved to be particularly prescient:
O'BRIEN
Next time we start a post-war
reconstruction, maybe we should wait
for the war to be over.FENTRESS
Yeah, I know, peace is hell.
I turned that script in, as I recall, a few days before the Saddam statue was pulled down. When the executive called me a few days later, she said, "We f***ing love this script." She said that if they were going to make it they wouldn't ask me to change a single word. Unfortunately, she also said that HBO would never make it now. Not because Iraq was controversial. That was okay. The reason she gave was that while I was busy writing, HBO had made a deal with Spielberg and Hanks to do the follow up to the hugely successful "Band of Brothers" with the new installment set in the Pacific. There was no money left over for another war project.
About a year after that, Stephen Bochco and F/X made a lot of news with their own Iraq war drama, "Over There." It was very high quality, but the numbers weren't good enough, and it was canceled. HBO, which doesn't care so much about total numbers, might have let "Hearts & Minds" stay on-the-air and grow. In some alternative universe, it's probably a big hit and was responsible for ending the war before it got to this place.
Anyway, because it's not doing me any good sitting in my closet, I'm making that script available for download now. It just seems that Iraq is such a big deal, and it was kind of fun seeing how close the script came, knowing that it was written even before the looting of Baghdad. For starters, I did not have us being greeted as liberators.
I also got car bombs and kidnappings down, but I didn't make it bad enough. And the idea that Iraqis would start killing themselves in this sectarian violence, that was something I thought about but figured would not be allowed to happen because the people-in-charge (us) would be ready for it. Well, sometimes truth is sadder than fiction... Maybe I should have just kept it in Afghanistan...
Note: The graphic montage above is not anything official to the project. I created it from news sources during my writing process to inspire me to hit certain key emotional connections.
