The UNIT

Have you been watching THE UNIT on ABC? Especially for those of us that love our military romance heroes, it is a fabulous show. It stars Dennis Haysbert, who was the beloved presedent David Palmer on 24. He was wonderful as president and he's wonderful as the Unit's first sergeant.

Anyway, the point here, besides the admonition that, if you love military romance, you might want to watch THE UNIT, is that the latest episode really bothered me. It made me uncomfortable as I watched it, and it left me with questions that keep me uncomfortable.


The episode log line: The Unit enters the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance Escape) training course and they are lead to believe that they will be guards. The group is soon shocked to discover that they are actually the POWs for an undetermined amount of time.

While we all know that our military personnel must be prepared to withstand being prisoners of war for the sake of national security, the question raised by this eposide was how far do the good guys go to prepare other good guys to fall into the hands of the bad guys.

While it was nearly painful to watch our heroes undergo some extraordinary torture in SERE training, and the viewer was supposed to hate the DOD witch that kept upping the ferocity of the attacks on them, I was left wondering if she wasn't right.

All through the episode, I railed against this woman who was seemingly over the line. That's what the writers wanted. When Kim asked the Colonel "What did you do to him?" the Colonel answered, "Too much." The writers believed that. The viewer believed it, too. And yet. . .

The enemy is far past ruthless as we've seen as they behead innocent civilians on public television. And, of course, we don't want to kill our own men in SERE training.

And how about the guys who run SERE? What effect does it have on a man to torture his fellow soldiers in the name of making them strong?