Soldier boy
Stephen Canty was born in Richmond, the middle child of three boys, and grew up in Louisa. He didn’t have any artistic aspirations when he was young, but even then he liked to film things and play around with the footage on the computer, adding slow motion and music. He even made a short movie for a school project once, but it never occurred to him that he could do it for a living.
He didn’t know what he wanted to do for a living. A self described “angsty” kid, what he did know was that the path he saw his classmates heading down, the right path he kept being told, wasn’t for him.
“I was intelligent. I went to Governor’s School, but to me, the idea that I’m supposed to know what I want to do at 17 years old, and I’m picking it now, and I’m picking the school now, and I’m gonna start wearing the [college] hoodie, and then I’m gonna go to the school and get the white picket fence and the BMW and the wife… to me, all that was disgusting.”
And then he read the book Generation Kill, by Evan Wright, which chronicles the adventures of a bunch of young Marines, hopped up on videogames and heavy metal, racing their Humvees into Iraq in 2003. These, he thought, are the kind of guys I want to be around.
His grandfather had been a Marine in the Pacific during WWII, his dad flew C-130s in the Coast Guard, and his mom was in the Navy, but even so, his family wasn’t especially patriotic and nobody pushed the military on him.
“Don’t do it,” his grandfather said. “You’re too goddamn smart.”
It only made him want to join more. Halfway through his senior year of high school he told his mom he was joining the Marines. She cried, but she signed the papers, and in August of 2006 he drove down to Fort Lee, the angry, liberal punk rock of Anti-Flag and Strike Anywhere blasting the whole way. I, Stephen Canty, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies.
He started boot camp in February of 2007, and was done in May, just in time to graduate with his class. He walked with them up to the podium, held out his hand with them to receive his diploma, but he wasn’t like them anymore. Other parents, teachers, they told him he was throwing his future away. “Fuck you,” he thought. He was 17, and he was a Marine.
Like most teenagers, Canty was an idealist. The Marine Corps told him he was going to fight terrorists, and he believed them. He remembers telling his mom that he was willing to die if it meant that one kid in Iraq could have a better life. But like a lot of young men, he was also motivated by something more primal.
“I wanted to do something I couldn’t do anywhere else. I wanted to see if I was tough enough to do that stuff. I wanted to just know deep down inside that I was capable of going to combat and fighting, and honestly, it really broke down to just, I want someone to try and kill me and me to kill them.”
One year later, he was sitting in a truck, riding through the dusty poppy fields of Helmand Province, Afghanistan.
Within a week of getting out of the military, Canty enrolled at PVCC with the hope of transferring. He got accepted at both William & Mary and UVA, and chose UVA. As a third year transfer there was a lot of pressure to decide what he was going to do with his life. His parents wanted him to get a business degree, but even if he’d wanted to, the business school didn’t accept transfer students with liberal arts degrees.
He’d been filming everything he could, reading books on moviemaking, and watching how-to-videos on YouTube. He’d also been talking to some of his buddies from Charlie Company, and kicking around the idea of making a documentary about their shared experiences coming home from war. That, and drinking beer, smoking pot, and trying to figure out how to date again.
Using a bunch of war footage that friends had sent him, he edited together a seven minute short film and put it up on YouTube. Way more than mere war-porn, it’s a slice of Marine life; goofing off, dancing, playing with Afghan kids, shooting guns, and getting shot, all set to Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.” and the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black.” It’s clearly made by someone who sees the world with more than just a soldier’s eye.
Perusing the UVA course catalogue, he saw the Media Studies program and decided that it was exactly what he wanted to do. But again, the course wasn’t open to transfer students. He appealed to the head of the department, but the answer was still no.
College was being paid for by the GI Bill, and it would only cover two more years. If he couldn’t use those two years to study something that mattered to him, why bother? As he walked away from the administration building towards his car, he told himself that he couldn’t just be a college drop out and do nothing. He had to get serious about filmmaking.
On the computer, Canty’s friend Zell talks about his dreams. His first year back he would have these weird dreams every night where he was going out on patrols that he knows he never went on.
“I don’t really ever dream,” Canty says, “but when I do …”
“They’re wicked?”
“Yeah. I mean, the other night … I was with Kruger [back in Afghanistan] when Kruger got shot, and before they put morphine in him, he was dying. He was gonna die. And I was, like, sitting there yelling, yelling ‘Kruger!’ yelling in his face. And there’s this weird look in somebody’s eyes when they’re about to die, like you see something in them fading away from you as if they were going underwater … and I have dreams where, like, just people I know, I’ll see that look in their face.”
There’s a pause.
“I think about it all the time,” Zell says. “All the time. You don’t ask for it. I think about the day Smitty and Angus got killed constantly.”