ABSTRACT
The trio of films—Behind Enemy Lines, Black Hawk Down, and Kandahar—underscores just how risky it is in the morally uncertain post-Vietnam era to base US morality on a claim to be helping a feminized other, especially when that other does not want the kind of help the United States has to offer. A foreboding soundtrack introduces Collateral Damage. As increasingly thick clouds of smoke overlay the black background of the title: sequence, urgent short-wave radio chatter about a fire joins the music. Vigilantism is an undeniable motif in post-9/11 US foreign policy, in Afghanistan or Iraq. As such, it is an undeniable part of the US we. There were objections that the film stereotyped Colombians as one-dimensional, drug-dealing terrorists and, more important, that the portrayal of US firefighters as vigilantes dishonored their heroism on 9/11.
