“Overwatch’s short list of prospective agents included two members of the soldier enhancement program: Morrison and Gabriel Reyes, a senior officer. Reyes, a hardened and highly respected veteran, grew up about as far from rustic Indiana as you could get—the sprawling urban melting pot of Los Angeles. Despite their differences, the two soldiers became friends. Their decision to join Overwatch together would change the world, for good and for bad.”
1: Interestingly, ‘Soldier’ is a loaded term. For laypersons, anybody fighting in the military might be called a soldier. But if you ask military personnel, ‘soldier’ specifically means Army. A Marine, for example, will get pretty ticked if you call them a soldier.
2: In the US military branches, ‘Commander’ is not an Army rank, but it is a rank in
the Navy, Marines and Coast Guard. In the UN’s Overwatch, ‘Commander’
Reyes and ‘Strike Commander’ Morrison are job titles, not military
ranks. But if Gabriel was Commander Reyes even before Overwatch, then
that’s probably a military rank and it means he wasn’t Army.
Also,
while Army Rangers and Special Forces are both Army groups, the US
Special Forces Command (SOCCOM) is the command group ALL US special
operations units report to, and it is cross-branch. Since it handles
all special operations activities, it’s the command that a project like
SEP would probably have been placed under, and that could have opened
SEP to recruiting from military branches beyond the Army (Navy, Marine
Corp, Air Force, Coast Guard).
All of which is to say that Jack is definitely Army, but Gabriel might not be.
3: Double-pointing to a thing in Seg’s stuff here: that Blackwatch was Overwatch’s covert ops division.
He said this already, but to reiterate: A clandestine operation is an operation where the activity is kept secret. A covert operation (aka ‘black op’) is a deniable operation. As in, it might be apparent that it happened, but part of the job is to make sure nobody knows who’s responsible. In the US, covert operations are controlled by the CIA.
Ergo, Blackwatch was there specifically to do things Overwatch didn’t want traced back to them.
4: I want to dig into the commando stuff more. Seg covered most of there is to glean from it fact-wise, but there’s still a lot there to unpack regarding mood and motif of the world and the characters involved.
First, we know Jack’s commando skins are specifically a 1970s reference. That means: Vietnam War.
For those born in the 1990s and later, or in other countries, I don’t know if there’s a real understanding of how deeply the Vietnam War saturated the American consciousness in the 60s, 70s and even into the 80s. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that to some extent, it broke us on a societal, cultural level. It was consuming, in the way that the Trump administration is consuming now. Maybe even more so, at least to the extent that we don’t know yet what the final outcome of curent political events will be.
It reached deep into personal lives. My aunt’s fiance hanged himself, rather than answer the draft. It’s impacting us even now. I see it daily, in the ever-deepening emotional schism between political parties, in the catastrophic depth of mistrust we’ve come to hold for politicians, and in the way it STILL influences politics. to younger people, arguments about draft-dodging are only a general commentary on the courage and honor of the politician in question. But to people who grew up in the Vietnam era, it’s a criminal brand. A scarlet letter that says, “When the rest of us were dying, being tortured, living in terror and grief, screaming in the streets as our own communities were rent apart over this issue…this person ran away and hid.”
Mohammed Ali went to jail and lost his career over his opposition to the draft and the Vietnam War. He was far, far, far from the only one. We lowered the age to vote because of the Vietnam War–because our young men were old enough to be sent to fight and die, but not old enough to vote.
Now, remember what Jack says about the Omnic Crisis?
“Politics, mismanagement, egos…”
Unlike the Omnic Crisis, the Vietnam War was politically motivated. But apparently like the Omnic Crisis, it was a war managed (mismanaged) by politics and egos, and accordingly it wallowed, bogged down again and again. The longer it dragged out, the more politicians felt their careers were on the line. In all that frustration and desperation, pressure was put on military leaders and extreme and often unethical methods were tried.
What I’m saying is that while the commando skin and sprays might be a reference to what Jack and Gabriel do, I’m also very sure that they are a reference to their attitudes. They’re not just skins. Jack wears the daredevil skin as a Halloween costume. And if he’s a fan of those old movies, if he identifies with the commandos of the Vietnam War, then maybe he’s got some good reasons.
And there’s also the treatment of the veterans post-war. US treatment of its veterans and wounded warriors has always been…messy. But where previously at least being a veteran had been a point of pride, and you could expect parades and a warm welcome, veterans returning from Vietnam were spat on in the streets. Although their population is aging, these days, Vietnam veterns STILL make up a disproportionate number of the US homeless population, in particular mentally ill homeless (the ratio of Vietnam vets making up the mentally ill homeless of New York City was at one point in the 1990s above 60%). Between PTSD, the effects of exposure to Agent Orange and other chemicals, war injuries, the high number of POWs and MIA soldiers…they were essentially abandoned. Over a decade of advocacy work resulted in the Veterans Affairs system we have now and advancements in the identification and treatment of PTSD that put medicine on the path to where it is now, but that was all necessary because they were being given almost nothing to begin with.
The reason the violence of 1980s shows in the US is so cartoony is also the influence of the Vietnam War. 80s tv aficionados might notice the high number of protagonists from prime time dramas, like MacGyver and The A-Team, who were military veterans. These were attempts by producers, who were often veterans or relatives of veterans, seeking to rehabilitate the public image of the men who’d served in the war–who after all mostly never asked to be there in the first place.
Again, I can’t help but think that Soldier: 76, or at least his writers, might be attracted to the motif at least partly because of the parallels there.
5: A few other thoughts about commandos, special operations, etc. and what it might tell us about Jack and Gabriel:
First, commandos and the modern US Special Forces (in the Green Berets sense) are separate. They don’t do the same things.
There’s overlap between ‘commando’ and ‘special operations’ but they aren’t synonymous. Commando units are best considered a KIND of special operations group. But commando units primarily do work you’d recognize as ‘traditional soldiering.’ They do front-line reconnaissance, in and around battle lines, but they are not the ones who slip deep into enemy territory to gather intelligence. They perform raids–targeted quick-moving missions into and back out of enemy territory for a specific goal–and they’ll do clandestine operations. But they do not, for the most part, do covert operations–or if they do, they are there mainly to serve as backup for the guys who are actually performing the task.
In particular, they don’t do unconventional warfare.
Commandos have been around for ages, but special operations grew out of the idea of ‘elite soldiers’ to become its own thing once unconventional warfare became a thing that militaries wanted to do. Unconventional warfare is when specially trained military personnel are sent into a hot spot the military has a strategic interest in–let’s say Syria, for example–to recruit, train and assist local rebel forces and help them build militias and implement guerilla warfare against a shared enemy. It’s something commandos are not trained to do, but special forces are. This is why Green Berets are trained so ridiculously well in languages and cultural competency.
Fun fact: if you’ve ever wondered about the mysterious upswing of terrorist groups and organized guerilla rebellions in the world in the last 60 years or so, this is why.
Fun fact #2: There’s a line drawn between doing unconventional warfare vs. supplying those people with weapons. The latter is known as ‘weapons proliferation’ and is controlled by a number of international treaties. Weapons proliferation is also one of the allegations that were brought against Blackwatch.
Anyway. We know Gabriel is in covert operations. Gabriel also recruits heavily from within organizations Overwatch is actively fighting–that’s not a coincidence; suborning sympathetic people on the inside is one of the best ways to get intel and undermine an enemy organization. (And it’s ironic that it was turned back against Overwatch via Amelie.) Gabriel’s unit ends up facing allegations related to covert operations and unconventional warfare. Gabriel is in military intelligence. If he was Army, he was probably Green Berets. If he was Navy, he was probably a SEAL.
We don’t know about Jack. He was definitely Army, and almost certainly in in some kind of elite forces, so he could have been a Green Beret. But he might also have been an Army Ranger, which is the US Army force most in line with being a commando unit.
6: But I keep going back to the commando skin. In the Vietnam War, Green Berets WERE still commandos. And they did some very special–and rather war crimey–work.
In particular, the Green Berets were the lynchpin of a group they formed along with Navy SEALS, Marine Corps Force Recon and UK’s SBS. Called the “Military Assistance Command Vietnam-Studies and Observations Group’ or MACV-SOG, it was a volunteer unit, and so top secret that the military denied its existence until the 1980s. These guys parachuted behind enemy lines, carried out routine recon in the most dangerous parts of the war zone, recovered downed pilots (a particular target of the Viet Cong), attempted POW rescues, and crossed borders into Laos and Cambodia to perform military operations in those countries under the auspices of the CIA.
These guys were the real life fabric from which wild-eyed war movies are made. The stunts they pulled were legendary. Their kill counts and casualty ratios were also legendary. They’re extremely well-known in military history circles, since they were in some senses the lynchpin of the Vietnam War–both in terms of so much of the military tactics and action, and also in terms of why the war has continued to leave a bad taste in our mouths in the decades since. They were also, in a lot of ways, the brthplace of modern special forces in their current form.
And the things they did, in concert with the CIA before and during the Vietnam War, are maybe relevant. There’s a lot to it, but you can look up Operation Menu, and Operation Freedom Deal, to start. Parts of these campaigns were kept hidden from Congress by President Nixon and Henry Kissinger. They involve widespread bombings of countries the US was nominally not at war with. They include the laying of minefields that are still blowing up children and farm worker in those regions, and illegal surveillance raids by MACV-SOG personnel across national borders. There was an elaborate system of secrecy in place, which set up the troop and resource movements under false pretenses, and then via secret command channels that ran all the way from the front lines to the White House and back, diverted those resources to illegal activities.
In light of the things it’s implied Blackwatch did, and the questions of how it happened, how long it was going on, and who knew…this might be relevant.
