Stanley McChrystal: evaluation

Transcript context

…If I’m looking to movies, which movies can people watch, do you think, ultimately, are the most accurate portrayals of the military? Are there any good ones? It’s hard for me to judge portrayals of the military back from wars that I wasn’t in. Because I know the ones I like, but I can’t tell which are accurate. If you watch the movie Black Hawk Down, the very high-energy pictures of the actual combat, I think, were a little overdone, and close friends of mine who were there will say, “Yeah, that was Hollywooded up.” But at the same time, I thought that the depiction of how the movie portrayed Delta Force operators, the JSOC commanders who I had known, General Garrison — and they depicted him in the movie — and then the Rangers, was remarkably accurate. It felt as though they had captured the essence of how the people I had known for so much of my career acted. I thought it was pretty realistic to the personas. Is military fiction a genre in decline? Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead was a huge bestseller in its day. Now people live in Brooklyn — they read Jonathan Franzen. Has that changed? Or is military fiction still relevant?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.