Just before seeing The War Tapes, Deborah Scranton's new documentary featuring firsthand footage shot by national guardsmen in Iraq, I complained to a friend that I've found many of the battleground documentaries to come out of this war to be rather, well, boring. It's not really the fault of the filmmakers, I noted -- embedded documentarians can only see so much action and, in a war where most of the fighting takes the form of car bombs and public explosions, it often feels like what is really being captured is less the act of combat and more the act of waiting in tortured suspense for potential catastrophe.
My friend immediately pointed out that looking to our wars for visceral entertainment was a pretty backward way of thinking, and that shut me up pretty quickly. But as it turns out, The War Tapes offers its own rebuttal to my argument -- for unlike earlier frontline docs, such as Occupation Dreamland and Gunner Palace, Scranton's film compellingly demonstrates exactly how frustrating and demoralizing the helplessness of the current occupation can be for troops on the ground. With no clear sense of purpose and a heightening feeling of impotence, the soldiers at the center of The War Tapes are prime examples of how George W. Bush's Iraq adventure has been particularly damaging for the men and women forced to carry it out.
Scranton gave digital video cameras to three members of the New Hampshire National Guard headed to Iraq in 2004, and the resulting footage carries more immediacy then most of what is shot by embedded journalists. The soldiers only take part in one real ambush, but are witnesses to numerous explosions and random gunfire. The fact that all these men are not even in a pure military unit but rather in a state National Guard adds to the viewer's anxiety -- how much training could they have had for a place like Iraq? Moreover, the soldiers regularly struggle with understanding exactly what it is they are supposed to be doing in Iraq. Claims of bringing democracy to the country ring hollow for soldiers forced to protect Halliburton supply trucks.
The three guardsmen with cameras cover the spectrum in terms of motives for going to war. Specialist Michael Moriarty signed up for the National Guard soon after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and heads to Iraq with patriotic fervor. Sergeant Steven Pink is cynical about the journey from the beginning; he has little doubt that we went to war for oil, but is quite comfortable with that rationale. Sergeant Zack Bazzi is a fluent Arabic speaker from Lebanon and a regular reader of The Nation who nonetheless finds comfort in the soldier's life.
Scranton spends too much time diving into the psychology of each one of these men, and includes too many lengthy interviews with their family members and girlfriends. The interviews she does with the men after they return from Iraq are more interesting. Moriarty retains some belief in the mission but has no interest in returning to the country; Pink suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and continues to be utterly jaded about the whole venture; Bazzi re-enlists in the National Guard, and emphasizes that as a soldier “we don't get to choose the wars we fight.”
The process from enlistee to worn-out veteran that occurs for most of these men is offered without commentary; The War Tapes is decidedly silent about what these experiences suggest for the entire enterprise. The lack of concern for the big picture is somewhat frustrating -- at the very least, it would have been nice to know what exactly the National Guard unit's role was in the war effort and how many casualties, if any, the group suffered as a whole. But the singular focus on the three individuals does provide the clearest detail yet of how this war and its unclear rationale have produced a state of limbo for troops, not just the ones in Iraq but also for the ones that return. As The War Tapes demonstrates, one of the biggest flaws of this war is that we put troops in harm's way without even providing them an unchanging, sincere reason for why they were being put there in the first place.
Sudhir Muralidhar is a writer living in New York.
