Former CIA master of disguise helps disfigured people come out of hiding | Hacker News Reader

Former CIA master of disguise helps disfigured people come out of hiding

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If you find this an interesting topic, you might enjoy this book: The Facemaker by Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: https://drlindseyfitzharris.com/the-facemaker/

From the moment the first machine gun rang out over the Western Front, one thing was clear: mankind’s military technology had wildly surpassed its medical capabilities. The war caused carnage on an industrial scale, and the nature of trench warfare meant that thousands sustained facial injuries. In The Facemaker, award-winning historian Lindsey Fitzharris tells the true story of the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, who dedicated himself to restoring the faces of a brutalized generation.

Gillies, a Cambridge-educated New Zealander, established one of the world’s first hospitals dedicated entirely to facial reconstruction. At a time when losing a limb made a soldier a hero but losing a face made him a monster to a society largely intolerant of facial differences, Gillies restored not just faces, but identities and spirits.

The Facemaker places Gillies’s ingenious surgical innovations alongside the dramatic stories of soldiers whose lives were wrecked and repaired. The result is a vivid account of how medicine and art can merge, and of what courage and imagination can accomplish in the presence of relentless horror.

I still remember the pictures of real war injuries they showed to us during a first aid course at military. Such pictures should be shown way more. People have a way too clean conception of war, probably because of movies. It's dirty business with horrific consequences.

Many Hollywood movies depicting war or any military related things have the sponsorship (or are co-scripted) of the DoD, mostly as a recruitment tactic, the same way they pay for the anthem to be played at NFL games.

How else can you get a bunch of kids to have as a life long dream to kill and be killed? You make it look cool and glamorous and hide the nasty bits. If war movies were real they'd all end up with your team half dead in combat and the other half committing suicide back at home from the PTSD.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93entertainment...

if you self funded such a movie, would you be allowed to publish it?

Of course you would be allowed to (self) publish it, first amendment and so on. Whether you would be vilified by jingoists and/or glorified by anti-war activists is a separate question.

> DoD, ... they pay for the anthem to be played at NFL games.

What? And that is not controversial?

I had never considered that the DoD might pay for playing the national anthem at NFL games (playing the anthem is a staple of high school games, and I know my school didn't get any DoD funding), and after a quick search it appears that what they pay for is things like flyovers, having service members hold out a large flag on the field, buying them tickets to the game afterward (where they can be seen in uniform in the stands), etc.

It's marketing.

And the number bandied about in the first few links was something like $5.5 million over three years. Not a huge amount of money.

I think kids are recruited because they are disadvantaged in some way - economically, academically, etc. and are presented with a notion that the military is their only option to "escape". I don't think kids dream of killing because they see movies, I think they dream of the camaraderie, wanting to look like & talk like those they see in the movies and to fight against bad forces in the world. Only 10% of the military people actually engage in combat [0] (was a stat from when the US had troops in Afghanistan).

If the trades advertised as much as the military there wouldn't be shortages of electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians, etc. Some of those careers are just as highly technical as programming and might pay just as much (sans stock options). Hollywood doesn't make movies about plumbers though.

[0] https://www.thesoldiersproject.org/what-percentage-of-the-mi...

That's the motivation to join the military, but people would be less willing to join and more interested in alternatives if the reality of war wasn't obscured by mass-media depictions.

Not to say that any of this is funny in any way, but I've always found it fascinating how mankind can find humor in even the worst facts of life. It might not always be pretty, but in this case there is a beautiful and IMHO hilarious movie about the subject of facial mutilation in the first world war period: Au Revoir Là Haut, translated as See You Up There in English.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt5258850/

I learned of this from the Richard Harrow character in Boardwalk Empire. The show didn't delve into his mask, but it prompted me to research such prosthesis. That's a show that doesn't get enough love.

Similarly, most people aren't aware that one of the biggest contributors to reconstructive cosmetic surgeries in Germany was the coal mining industry. Because coal mines had such a horrific track record of disfiguring injuries, they gave rise to an entire industry of reconstructive cosmetic surgery before WW1. After WW1 the surgeons mostly pivoted to treating veterans.

This is a truly beautiful use of his skills.

I read the article as an exemplar of dual-use technology.

I really hope this guy has his "trade secrets" set up on some sort of dead man's switch. It would be a tragedy to lose this knowledge with him.

The field is known as anaplastology and while the article throws shade on the movie industry, there are some talented people that have come across from there.

That is what patents are for. Encourage the inventor to share the technology, in exchange for a limited monopoly on its usage.

Or like in magic eventually somebody else will figure it out if it’s really basic at the fundamentals.

Would techniques of a CIA agent fall under the Invention Secrecy Act or similar?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act

Not the techniques described in the fine article.

Impressive skills. But maybe he should teach his techniques and train people?

You seem to assume he doesn't; your comment is in bad faith.

He clearly says in the video that no one else knows how to do what he does. Waiting list to see him is months.

His skills are an amazing gift to the world and would deserve to be taught and shared?

I don't see the bad faith there.

Quite possibly the first decent thing to ever come out of the CIA. Chapeau.

You forgot about the Unabomber.

It makes me wonder if technology can ever help with scale on something like this that appears to be really determined by true human artistry. Really nice story.

i would think so... particularly if only half the face is disfigured we ought to be able to scan the other half and then 3d print a mold... even the coloring seems plausible to machine. not sure if current tooling can do it, but maybe one day

I think so. We have technology that can create 3D models and high resolution images of faces and we have 3D printing technology. I'm 99% sure tools like this are already used in e.g. limb prosthetics - although I can imagine casts and molds are still cheaper and faster.

Facebook shows off a realistic avatar from just a phone scan recently.

Surely that could be converted into some 3d model of sorts.

Lovely story, great to see someone who built skills for evil putting them to work for good.

Protecting Democracy and Freedom are evil?

I don't have a bone in this debate, but I think it would be better to phrase your comment differently. As a quick one-liner, it seems to intentionally talk past the intent of the person you're replying to.

Clearly (to me anyway) the implication of the other comment is that the CIA does not simply protect democracy and freedom. Nothing wrong with arguing that it does, but surely you can muster a more thoughtful defense. I think of HN as a place for attempts at high-value content and comments.

This comment actually lowers the quality of the discussion, regardless who's "right" in this specific debate. Just my two cents!

Reading through descriptions of the CIA interfering in foreign elections and supporting insurrections against democratically elected governments makes it difficult to agree that the CIA protects democracy and freedom - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

Ah Yes, CIA the protector of Democracy and Freedom... And organising Coups and destabilizing nations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...

How was orchestrating a coup that threw Chile into dictatorship against the democratically-elected and ever-popular Salvador Allende protecting democracy or freedom?

This reminds me of “Do you support the troops or not?” types of questions.

It reduces a vast and complex problem that’s rife with subjective matters to: are you with us or against us?

Not only that but it frames it in such a way that seemingly objectively great things are being proposed to be evil.

This kind of rhetorical question will probably never yield a useful direct response.

This is an example of doublespeak / doublethink. The CIA has done some nasty shit, not so much for "Democracy and Freedom" as a whole, but for the United States' own goals and purposes, at the cost of others - at the cost of other countries' democracy, at the cost of other people's freedoms.

Good, first time he's actually doing something, instead of spying on regular people and torturing them or something. +1

So we should just let criminals do whatever they want to do, building up impenetrable layers of defence and operate with impunity?

lol "woke" cia tried to replace old unwoke retiring agents with liberal college educated demographics that find this shit more appealing than naked imperialism

I'm not sure which part of that sentence is meant to apply to a CIA agent who retired in about 1990, could you explain?

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