Screened as part of the International Documentary Competition at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival, ‘The War Tapes’ is not so much a film as it is a collection of video letters back home edited together in quite a handy fashion to have a beginning, a middle and an end.
It is the war recorded while it is happening by the enlisted men doing the shooting and receiving the return fire. It is home videos taken leaving home, away from home and returning home.
The story of how soldiers happened to be given cameras along with their rifles is as ordinary as it is amazing.
Director Deborah Scranton received an invitation from the New Hampshire National Guard to embed in a unit headed for action in Iraq. Scranton, an accomplished documentary film maker and single mom, declined the offer but said she would go them one better. She offered to provide one-chip Sony miniDV cameras to soldiers and direct the resulting film from home via the Internet.
Astoundingly, the National Guard agreed. In the end, five soldiers shot the film in the heat of battle and Scranton and her crew turned it into a genuine, personal and at times heartbreaking film of war.
Scranton was joined in the production of the film by Robert May and Steve James, two of the most awarded producers in the business.
May was executive producer of Errol Morris’ award winning “Fog of War,” Robert S. McNamara’s accounting of the escalation of the Viet Nam war in the ‘60s that premiered at Cannes in 2003. He also produced the sparkling and charismatic “The Station Agent” with director Tom McCarthy.
James is the director, producer and co-editor of the smash indie documentary “Hoop Dreams.”
After asking for volunteers and reducing the potential cameramen to a group of five, Scranton gave each a camera with tripod rigging that was eventually adapted to helmets, gun turrets and clamp-on static mountings. The cameras went with the men on their daily missions in the contested Sunni Triangle in Iraq, one of the hottest areas in the country.
Support base Anaconda was never out of earshot of explosions. During that time they recorded some 250 direct enemy engagements, nearly one a day.
‘The War Tapes’ follows on the heels of the big budget narrative ‘Jarhead’ which is based on infantry experiences during what was mostly an air war in Kuwait.
Although the first phases of the Iraq War were heavily mechanized, the work for the infantry started after Bush declared “mission accomplished.” It was then that Halliburton and their subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root moved in the make hay while the sun shone with the US military providing the cover.
KBR trucks rule the roads and third country nationals, nick-named TCNs, drive the trucks.
Often the trucks are damaged before the run, some without even windshields to shield the TCNs from the blasts of roadside IEDs.
Their deaths don’t even make the news.
Other deaths that don’t make the news are civilians killed by the KBR trucks and military Humvees as they roar at breakneck speeds along the local roads. There is nothing that stops the convoy once it is in motion, for to stop is to invite ambush.
But ‘The War Tapes’ story doesn’t stop when the soldiers return home. The taping continues as the returned soldiers get on with life, returning to their families, jobs and school.
One has nightmares that don’t promise to end. One has remained enlisted and may return to the front.
Families are interviewed and there almost universal opposition to the war and their loved ones’ involvement explored.
As one of the soldiers says, “F*** the oil, man...it’s not worth it. I’ll walk everywhere in the US. I’ll recycle everything...I’ll even drive a Honda Insight. You know, one of those Hybrid thingy’s?”
Maybe we need a few of our leaders to embed in the military as well as our reporters.
They might come back believing, like the soldiers, that recycling and conserving are better choices than war.
Opening very limited, New York City June 2, 2006 MPAA not rated
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