III.
Why did these former soldiers behave as they did? Was it greed pure and simple? As Ed Mireles opines, “Platt and Matix wanted the good life, and in Miami that means a big home, preferably on the beach, a new car, boats, trips to Disney World and lots of leisure time. That is the common profile of drug dealers and people who commit fraud on a grand scale. So, in that respect, they were normal criminal minded people.”
Perhaps the most revealing scene near the climax of the movie takes place on the morning of Friday, April 11, 1986, when mere hours before the firefight, Mike Platt is driving his teenage stepson to school. Playing on the radio is a news report announcing U.S. military airstrikes against the rogue state of Libya. The airstrikes were conducted in response to evidence linking Libyan dictator Colonel Qaddafi and his agents to the terrorist bombing of La Belle disco tech in West Germany, which killed two American servicemen, just earlier in the month. (The airstrikes indeed occurred three days after the shootout.) Platt casually exclaims that “it’s about time we did something about that Qaddafi. If you ask me, it’s time to take him out.” Platt’s stepson nods in agreement and then tells Platt that he is writing a term paper on the Vietnam War. It is here, in an unusually rare moment of clarity, Platt reveals the sullen truth, that contrary to his earlier claims of battlefield heroics, he spent his entire Army career based stateside or in Seoul, South Korea, but he never served in Vietnam at all. He was “all ready to go, and then some wimp in Washington pulled the plug.” But, he says almost prophetically, “the way things are going in the Middle East, you might not need to worry about writing the paper. Why don’t you just join the service and kick butt?” The stepson chuckles nervously. It is here that Platt is exposed for what he really is, a narcissistic coward and a braggart, the irony of his prophecy about U.S. involvement in the Middle East notwithstanding.
In the aftermath of the shootout, numerous media reports played up the fact of Platt and Matix’s veneer of being upstanding, law abiding, and patriotic American citizens. But this brings to mind, Dr. Samuel Johnson’s classic saying that “Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels” in studying the contradiction between the villains’ outward appearances and the reality of their violent criminal activity.
One undisputed fact was that during the shootout, in real life, and as seen on the television reenactment, the bad guys, armed with automatic weapons, took an incredible number of bullet wounds, but managed to continue firing at the agents, who were less heavily armed. Why didn’t they surrender? What was their endgame? Had they actually managed to escape, they would have had to request medical attention; they could not have simply wandered into a hospital with a made-up story. Doctors are required by law to report gun injuries. Yet unbelievably, the dastardly duo made one last-ditch effort to drive away, after limping from their stolen car to a vehicle belonging to some of the deceased or wounded agents. When someone is running on pure adrenalin they act on pure impulse. in mind.
Mireles is shown preventing the killers’ attempted escape by firing final shots into them. The words “It’s over, you bastards” come from the televised Mireles’s mouth. In real life, Agent Mireles recalls shouting some much harsher language. Who can blame him? Two of his buddies—Grogan and Dove were killed in cold blood—and Mireles and the rest of the team were critically injured. As the real Mireles recalls:
“They did not hesitate to fire their weapons and shoot people in cold blood. Was it their military training? Partly yes, the rest was their psychopathic personalities. As far as their ‘not giving up’ goes, that is also, a very large part military training. But somewhere in the DNA mix is their psychopathic personalities. Those two main factors, training and personality, equate to how a person reacts, what a person does.”
Francois Truffaut is believed to have said that it is impossible to make an antiwar film. On screen, the action looks too exciting for the audience to be properly repelled by the idea of combat. The FBI Murders’ climactic firefight is sufficiently action-packed. But Ed Mireles has written in his own account the experience of feeling battle fatigue and survivor’s guilt.
C.S. Lewis once wrote “The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’… …by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.”
Perhaps, though, with all due respect to Lewis, there are some experiences that can never be familiar to audience members and critics and scholars. These are just a few minutes of combat situations. The televised depiction of the events that culminated in this infamous episode is certainly shrouded in myth and creative license. The FBI Murders’ value is that it takes the things we don’t know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of unfamiliarity.’ That is where the relationship of docudrama to reality merges positively.
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Author: The Best American Poetry
