Powerhouse ‘Palace’
David Koon, Arkansas Times
3/17/2005 Part of the reason war is so damned terrible is — of course — the kids they send off to war. While diplomacy and politics are the prerogative of the old, it’s always up to the young folks to fight when the politicians can’t resolve their differences. The scars left over, even the ones you can’t see, linger much longer than battle.
While we haven’t started seeing the psychological fallout of the Iraq War, we surely soon will be. With Iraq turning out to be the same kind of never-safe, who’s-my-friend-who’s-my-enemy combat that turned a generation of young Vietnam veterans into emotional basketcases, the tidal wave of internally wounded young men and women are coming and when they get here, it surely won’t be pretty.
The proof of that goes on display this weekend at Market Street Cinema, with “Gunner Palace.” A documentary profiling the lives of a group of young soldiers on the front lines of Iraq, it’s a moving and insightful piece, one that keeps its politics in check so as to reach as wide an audience as possible.
Here, filmmakers Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker spent six months with 400 members of the 2/3 Field Artillery, the “Gunners.” Spending their days holed up in one of Uday Hussein’s bombed-out pleasure palaces — complete with a round bed and an Olympic-sized swimming pool (which makes for some surreal, “Apocalypse Now”-style scenes as helicopter gunships swoop and return fire over what might be a backyard pool party) — the young soldiers spend their days chasing rats and playing stupid jokes on one another, and their nights patrolling the streets, where every box, bag or lump of trash might be a dreaded Improvised Explosive Device.
The most tragic thing of all in “Gunner Palace” is not the explosions or gunfire or even the news that some of the young men we see onscreen have been killed. Most tragic is how comfortable these young soldiers have become with death. They chat about it like the weather. It hangs about them like smoke, even when they are just lounging around the pool, waiting to go back out on patrol.
In order to get that close to death, you have to put something away — something vital. While that process is a necessity in the morally lopsided place Iraq has become, “Gunner Palace” is a film that both asks and then hints at an answer to the ultimate question of war — the same question poets from Homer to Walt Whitman have asked before: No matter who wins or loses, once you’ve made young men who are comfortable walking with death, what do you do with them?
Though the answer to that is yet to be told, “Gunner Palace” is a good entree to what is likely to be a long and costly American nightmare. No matter where you come down politically on the subject of the Iraq War, it’s a movie you must see, if only to measure the cost of our convictions.
David Koon, Arkansas Times
