Modern Warfare 3 advertising criticised by US veteran

A former US paratrooper has accused Modern Warfare 3’s ‘The Vet and the n00b’ trailer of “setting a new low” by trivialising and sanitising war.

Writing for the Atlantic, Afghanistan veteran D.B Grady criticised the timing of the trailer, which features Jonah Hill and Sam Worthington fighting in a bombed New York City: “After ten years of constant war, of thousands of amputees and flag-draped coffins, of hundreds of grief-stricken communities, did nobody involved in this commercial raise a hand and say, ‘You know, this is probably a little crass. Maybe we could just show footage from the game.'”

Grady is quick to stress that his argument is not against the depiction of war in popular culture, but that Activision should not be marketing the war experience as fun: “As Afghanistan intensifies and we assess the mental and physical damage to veterans of Iraq, is now really the time to sell the country on how much fun the whole enterprise is?”

“Here I point to the giddy howls of one supposed soldier in the commercial as he fires a grenade launcher at some off-screen combatant. War is great, see? It’s like a gritty Disneyland.”

Grady also criticises Activision for its use of the tagline ‘there’s a soldier in all of us’ to promote Call of Duty’s multiplayer modes in Black Ops and Modern Warfare 3.

“No, there’s not,” he says.