[Danny Glover, Sam Underwood and Prema Cruz star in this dramatic
portrayal of the interwoven stories of three veterans that reveal the
traumatic effects of war on the psyches of different generations.]
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DANNY GLOVER: STILL MARCHING TO A DIFFERENT DRUMMER  
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Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon
November 12, 2021
Counterpunch
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_ Danny Glover, Sam Underwood and Prema Cruz star in this dramatic
portrayal of the interwoven stories of three veterans that reveal the
traumatic effects of war on the psyches of different generations. _

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In recent years, Danny Glover has used his formidable acting chops and
Hollywood connections to boost a series of independent films that
might otherwise have struggled to find an audience. San
Francisco’s most beloved home-grown movie star
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political activist appeared in _Sorry to_ _Bother You_, the widely
acclaimed directorial debut of Oakland musician  Boots Riley.
[[link removed]] In
2019, Glover played a key on-screen role in _The Last Black Man in
San Francisco_, the break-through film of director Joe Talbot and
actor Jimmy Fails, both San Francisco natives.

Glover is now starring in _The Drummer [view the trailer here
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moderator], _released on Nov. 9. It’s a low-budget feature film
co-written by Eric Worthman and Jessica Gohlke, who also serve as
director and producer respectively. The subject matter is not call
center worker exploitation or the gentrification of San
Francisco. _The Drummer _tells the interlinked story of three
soldiers who enlisted in the U.S. Army, became combat veterans in
Iraq, and then try to avoid being sent back to the same disastrous
George Bush-initiated conflict.

All find their way to the Watertown, N.Y. office of Mark Walker, a
lawyer, Vietnam veteran, and anti-war activist played by Glover.
Walker has joined forces with a younger generation of dissidents in
Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and opened an internet café,
near Fort Drum, home of the fabled 10th Mountain Division and other
Army units. Called “The Drummer,” the cafe is Walker’s post 9/11
attempt to re-create the atmosphere of GI movement coffee houses
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near military bases in the Vietnam era, that welcomed and supported
restive draftees like Walker himself.

A DIFFERENT GENERATION

Unfortunately, as Walker acknowledges, “this is 2008, not 1968.”
The all-volunteer army recruits who become his clients lack a mass
anti-war movement to provide greater solidarity and political context
for their personal decisions to go AWOL and/or seek conscientious
objector status. Mike Tanaka, a Japanese-American soldier played by
Daniel Isaac, is profusely grateful when Walker helps him navigate a
“sanity hearing,” with Army shrinks, which is necessary to secure
an honorable discharge. But, with that legal hurdle overcome, Tanaka
is on the next bus out of town and unavailable for any press event
about his case. “I’m trying to build a soldiers anti-war
movement,” Walker complains, after this rebuff. “They need to be
part of something bigger than themselves.”

To avoid another calamitous deployment to Iraq, Cori Gibson, an
African-American soldier played by Prema Cruz, has been hiding out
with her grandmother, who urges Cori to seek Walker’s help. “The
Army gave me a purpose, “she tells her new lawyer. “I signed up to
pay for college.” Walker discovers that Gibson, who served as a
transportation specialist and gunner on a Humvee, has been raped by
her staff sergeant. When she reported this crime to her commanding
officer, he told her he had “more important things to worry about in
Iraq.” The experience of military sexual trauma leaves her isolated,
alone, and nearly paralyzed with depression.

Walker contacts the local Judge Advocate General Corps, and thinks he
has arranged Cori’s voluntary surrender to the military, so he can
help make her case for a medical discharge, In the meantime, he
persuades the anxious young soldier to tell her painful story at an
evening press conference at The Drummer, with her grandmother and
fellow veterans there for moral support. In an unexpected betrayal,
the military police crash the event and haul Cori away in hand-cuffs
ahead of schedule, leaving no time for her tell her story.

A FATAL FLASHBACK

The incident is unnerving for a third client, Darian Cooper (Sam
Underwood), a white working-class Iraq veteran who is torn between
fleeing the military with his wife and baby and returning to the front
lines with his squad. Before he is forced to choose, his
combat-related PTSD triggers a flashback that proves fatal for him and
his family. As a buddy had recently warned him, “the Army eventually
eats everybody up.”

These setbacks leave Walker feeling old, ailing, and unable to rally
the troops. He counts heads at a peace march and a smaller gathering
at a Catholic retreat center, only to find too many of the usual
suspects, gray-haired and earnest as always. “Resistance is all I
have left,” he confides, while wondering whether he should be
working with the environmental movement instead, because “that’s
where all the young activists are.” By the end of this dark and
moving film, The Drummer is closing up shop. But Walker has reunited
with Cori, who boosts his spirits this time and enlists him to become
her legal advocate again.

A decade or more after the heyday of the post-9/11active duty
resistance, some real-life veterans of that struggle may find _The
Drummer_ a bit too gloomy. (For a more upbeat journalistic account of
protest activity by soldiers who went AWOL, sought CO status, or even
spent time in military prisons to avoid further deployment to Iraq or
Afghanistan, see Dahr Jamail’s excellent _Will To Resist_ from
Haymarket Books). But any thoughtful feature film about life in the
military and afterwards is much welcome these days. _The
Drummer_ stands in sharp contrast to the usual Hollywood action film
dreck, in which fictional veterans respond to the world of hurt they
find themselves in by firing back at foreign and domestic enemies of
all types, while on bloody missions of salvation or revenge.

The quieter focus of this film is the lasting physical and
psychological impact of military service, under post 9/11 conditions.
This is a problem that director Eric Werthman has grappled with, in
real life, as a practicing psychotherapist, who has treated veterans.
As the brother of a Vietnam veteran, Danny Glover had his own personal
reasons for appearing in _The Drummer,_ and serving as its executive
producer. As Glover told the press in July,
[[link removed]]  the
fact “that there are even more veteran suicides than U.S. soldiers
killed in Iraq makes the film more timely than ever.” Now available
on major streaming platforms, _The Drummer _is definitely worth
watching.

_(Editor’s Note: The Drummer can be viewed via the following
platforms. DIGITAL: Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, Xbox, FandagoNow,
Vudu CABLE: iND-EST, Direct TV, AT&T U-Verse, Verizon, Vubiquity,
Dish, iND VOD)_

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