Grunt soldiers star in 'Gunner Palace'
Sean P. Means, The Salt Lake Tribune
Support the troops - by seeing what their lives in Iraq are really like.
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"War is all hell," said Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. Albert Einstein was attributed with defining insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
The insanity of the Iraq war, as depicted in the powerful documentary "Gunner Palace," is that our soldiers are doing the same thing over and over again while somebody - the politicians who sent them, or the couch potatoes who flip past them on the evening news - expects things to be different.
Filmmakers Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein capture the day-to-day life of the U.S. Army's 2/3 Field Artillery unit (nicknamed "the Gunners"), headquartered in a palace once belonging to Uday Hussein. The movie begins in September 2003, four months after President Bush stood in front of a "Mission Accomplished" banner and declared "major combat operations" over. The Gunners refer to what they experience as "minor combat."
The movie begins in that mocking tone, highlighting the gap between the Bush administration's official line about conditions in Iraq and the reality these troops see. But soon Tucker and Epperlein settle into a groove of tagging along with the Gunners' daily duties - guarding the palace and going on patrols through Adhamiya, one of Baghdad's roughest neighborhoods - and hanging out during the soldiers' down time.
On patrol, the Gunners deal with the threat of roadside bombs, the distrust of their Iraqi neighbors and the inadequacy of Army training in dealing with problems best handled by social workers. The soldiers put on a brave face, but their faces betray a feeling of being alone and a bit abandoned - a feeling that comes out full-force when a soldier describes scrounging for scrap metal to bolster their vehicles' inadequate armor-plating.
The down-time segments reveal what may become the prime artistic medium of the Iraq war: hip-hop. One of the strongest poets, Spc. Richmond Shaw, ends a rap decrying the short attention spans back home: "For y'all this is just a show, but we live in this movie."
There isn't much of a narrative arc to "Gunner Palace," and that's sort of the point of this grunt's-eye view of Iraq. When a war moves from invasion to occupation, with objectives unclear and no end in sight, a soldier's mission is to keep doing the same thing every day until your commanders tell you it's time to go home.
Sean P. Means, The Salt Lake Tribune
