Baghdad, locked and loaded
Shawn Levy, The Oregonian
Friday, March 18, 2005 Two years after the opening salvo, with more than 1,500 U.S. troops and countless Iraqis dead, the Iraq war remains largely mysterious and perhaps unknowable for most Americans.
This is due as much to the nature of the contemporary military as to governmental secrecy or the fog of war. Today's American armed forces -- the so-called collective "Army of one" -- are composed in such a way that many civilians don't know anybody in uniform, much less anyone on the ground in Iraq. For most Americans, the Iraq war is a matter of abstract political debate, not the life or death of a loved one. Individual servicemen and women sometimes emerge in official accounts of heroics or in scandals such as Abu Ghraib.
"Gunner Palace," an absorbing documentary by directors Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker, gets behind the armor and the camouflage to give viewers a clear if brief view of the men and women who fight and die under the American flag every day in Iraq. It gives a palpable sense of the boredom, the danger, the tacit terror, the surrealism and the absurdity. It's like reality TV with live ammo, "The Real World: Baghdad."
Tucker twice lived for a month with an Army field artillery unit known as the Gunners who've been housed in the bombed-out remains of one of Uday Hussein's former palaces. He found them a young, confused, brave, frightened, cynical group who signed over their lives to the military to escape dead-end situations back home or to accumulate adventures or college tuition credits. In Baghdad, equipped with neither sufficient armor nor military intelligence, policing a treacherous environment, they rely on gallows humor, the bonds of camaraderie and their superior firepower to survive one day at a time.
"Gunner Palace" presents the Iraq war as a kind of remix of the 1991 Gulf War with bigger and better weapons, a hip-hop soundtrack and some numbing and disquieting repetitions. Tucker's band of brothers and sisters chase their demons with the strains of electric guitars, rap songs about their living conditions and blowout parties around Uday's swimming pool. They mount patrols and raids that place them unnervingly in harm's way, from roadside bombs, mortar shells, little kids with rocks and a shadowy resistance that is often identical to the local authorities on whom the soldiers rely for liaison with the populace.
One of the most disturbing things the film drives home is the shifting nature of allegiances among Iraqis. The Gunners rely on civilian interpreters and on good relations with the local imams. But the loyalty of both groups wavers continually, and today's ally is often the target of tomorrow's raid (and, when captured, inevitably sent, as the narration reminds us repeatedly, to Abu Ghraib).
Amid this unease and chaos, Tucker and Epperlein focus on the faces and voices of the soldiers. They talk about their hometowns, acknowledge their anxieties, try tentatively to make positive contact with the locals, and speak ruefully about the realities that divide them from those of us who know about the war only through the media.
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Still, no matter your politics, the most important aspect of "Gunner Palace" is the window it affords us onto the daily lives of the men and women who've been sent to test some theory of global politics at the cost of their bodies, minds and lives. As one soldier raps, "For y'all this is just a show/but we live in this movie."
Shawn Levy, The Oregonian
