"Kansas to Kandahar" ... and back

It's a feel-good story that's so inspiring, you can hardly believe it happened in the same part of the world that has become synonymous with violence, sorrow and loss.

Two hundred Army reservists based in Olathe were shipped off to Afghanistan in the fall of 2005. Pilots flying massive yet oddly vulnerable Chinook helicopters. Gunners riding in back, trained to pick off enemy snipers who can bring down a Chinook with one well-placed bullet. Mechanics and support personnel on the ground, keeping the choppers flying in the most demanding conditions imaginable.

  “Kansas to Kandahar” is the name of the film that tells this story. It's a catchy title, and it's a wonderful film, airing at 8 p.m. Monday on KCPT and KTWU (check your PBS station for airtime). But the title only tells part of the story.

  Yes, the 200-plus members of Company B, 7th Battalion, 158th Aviation Regiment traveled from Olathe to Kandahar Airfield. But one year later, they also came back from Kandahar to Kansas.

  Every one of them.

  Kansas City Star readers have been fortunate to know about the members of Bravo Company for some time now. My colleagues Lee Hill Kavanaugh and Allison Long were embedded with the unit for a month last summer. They sent back stories and pictures of these “citizen soldiers,” many of whom had never been in a combat zone prior to their tour of duty in Afghanistan.

  Also observing Company B was Calvin Skaggs. You've likely never heard of this New York-based documentary filmmaker. Too bad. Remember that “Bill Moyers Journal” program on PBS a couple months ago? Moyers sang the praises of our paper's Washington bureau for casting doubt, way back in 2002, on the intelligence being used to justify an invasion of Iraq. I liked Moyers' report, but I liked it even better the first time, when Skaggs did it. Last fall he devoted a large chunk of his PBS film, “Democracy on Deadline,” to the bureau's pre-war reporting.

  For this film, Skaggs wanted to spend time with reservists, who tend to get overlooked or lumped in with guardsmen (Governor Sebelius referred to the 158th as “the Kansas National Guard” during a visit last year -- oops). And he wanted to make a film about Afghanistan, which has been overshadowed by our mess in Iraq.

  Skaggs was told there was a helicopter unit out of Kansas that would be the right fit. He wasn't so sure -- he'd heard aviators were “kind of snooty” -- but he agreed to come out and see for himself.

  “Within about three hours, I realized that these people are fantastic,” Skaggs told me last week. “They don't go around saluting each other. I mean, they respect their commanders, they respect the pilots … but the pilots respect them. It's a great example of a group of people working as a unit.”

  When you learn that most of those in Bravo Company never worked together before deployment, what they later accomplished seems even more remarkable. Two weeks into what was supposed to be a four-month training/bonding period at Fort Sill, Okla., they started getting shipped off to Pakistan to do humanitarian work in response to the devastating 2005 earthquake there.

  There would be no letup after that. Once in Afghanistan, Company B worked around the clock at Kandahar Airfield for eight months straight. Mechanics labored to keep the overworked Chinooks in top condition. Pilots flew dozens of missions a day, and more at night.

  The man in charge of this particular group, Lt. Col. Walter Bradley, knew many in his company personally. He had trained for years with them. He felt responsible for bringing everyone back safely, even though flying troops into battle zones meant that casualties were almost inevitable.

  “He's amazing. I adore him,” said Skaggs. “He trusts himself and he trusts his unit.”

  And, as it turns out, casualties weren't inevitable. Nobody in Company B died in Afghanistan. Were they lucky or good? Skaggs' film strongly suggests that it was mostly the latter. The 158th's service record was so exemplary, in fact, that the mechanics sooon became the talk of the Army.

  “The regular army from Bagram Air Base!” Skaggs yelled at me over the phone. “They start flying their planes down to Kandahar to be repaired and serviced by these guys from Bravo Company! Who are keeping 20 helicopters in the air, 18 of which are flying every day! It was incredible.”

  So yeah, they were good. If anyone got lucky, it was Skaggs. He was given a wonderful story to tell, at a time when there seem to be none to tell from the front lines. It's a story about the mundane rituals of keeping the wheels of warfare moving smoothly. It's about one tightly-knit group of worker bees in a foreign hive. It is somewhat abstracted from the battlefield itself. We see more of the Afghan mountains than we do of the Afghan people.

  However, by not trying to do too much -- by sticking to his knitting, just like Bravo Company did -- Skaggs produced a film with some real emotional heft.

  In one especially gripping and long scene, Skaggs and his cameraman Tom Hurwitz ride aboard a Chinook helicopter on a mission to drop off soldiers inside a battle zone. It's a spectacular view (filmed in high definition, for those of you with HDTV sets). Over the radio, a soldier sings a couple bars from “Ride of the Valkyries.” Another voice says, “You're no Wagner.”

  But as the sun sets and the chopper flies into the teeth of danger, the radio chatter goes quiet. The joking stops. The tension becomes palpable. You may feel your gut tightening. You'll hear a bleep as the aircraft approaches its destination, and someone swears. (See box.)

  Meanwhile, back home, where communication with loved ones was never that frequent, everyone worried. Skaggs returned to Kansas to keep an eye on them as well. One visit sticks out in his mind.

  “We were staying in this Holiday Inn and across from it was the Mall of the Great Plains,” he recalls. “It was just so moving because, if you take the aunts and the sisters and the wives and the husbands of the soldiers in the film, that's a few thousand people in the Kansas City area who are aware of someone in their lives who is in danger every day of their lives.

  “And yet, the other hundreds of thousands of people who live in the area have absolutely no sense of that whatsoever. They're shopping at the mall and going to eat and whatever. …

  “I can remember that during the Vietnam War, even during Desert Storm, people were aware that something was happening to us. But this war in Iraq and Afghanistan is like, off people's everyday radar. It's sad.”

  But “Kansas to Kandahar” is not a sad movie -- and that's only one of the reasons you should make an appointment to watch it tonight.

Bleeped language

After the Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident in 2004, the Federal Communications Commission began cracking down on so-called “indecency” on the airwaves. PBS documentaries have been bleeped ever since. The problem was that the FCC had no standard on what constitutes indecent language, and PBS lawyers could not guarantee local stations they wouldn't be fined for airing profanity in prime time. Indeed, a small PBS station in California was fined $15,000 for language in the documentary “The Blues.”

A federal court decision handed down last week may change that. The court ruled that the FCC had been “arbitrary and capricious” in its decisions since 2004. While the ruling is limited to two cases of “fleeting expletives” during live telecasts, the public broadcasting journal Current said that the judges' opinion “casts broader doubt” on whether the FCC can keep insisting that an occasional swear word on TV is indecent -- especially when uttered by a soldier in the heat of battle. — AB