Seeing Iraq through the eyes of troops
By now, the situation in Iraq has swollen into a ca ldron of darkness, light, hope, futility, growth, destruction, surprise, and shock. Into this quagmire in 2004 went troops from New Hampshire's National Guard, a few of whom were given cameras to report what they experienced.
From the year or so of footage, director Deborah Scranton and her two editors have built an invaluable and persuasive 97-minute opus. It's called ``The War Tapes," but that implies scandal or a cover up. Really the film is a deft first-person character study with a war zone for a background.
When it's over, you're not any closer to understanding the war. What stays with you are three sobering and complicated examples of its effect on the troops.
A few years ago, the New Hampshire National Guard offered Scranton an opportunity to go to Iraq as an embed. She declined but got permission to let the troops film themselves, training them to use the cameras.
Ten volunteered. Five wound up shooting, and Scranton, who edited the picture with Leslie Simmer and the seasoned documentary director Steve James, constructs the bulk of the film around three of them -- Specialist Mike Moriarty and Sergeants Steve Pink and Zack Bazzi.
They leave for Iraq in separate units and different states of mind.
The oldest of the three at 34, Moriarty is pumped. (He tidily describes himself as ``substantially patriotic.") Having barely missed service in the first Gulf War, he sees this trip as one he needs to make, even though his wife, understandably, wants him home with her and their kids.
Pink is 10 years younger, and his serious attraction to the morbid makes him natural for a war -- or at least war in a Sam Fuller picture. In Iraq, he reads from the journal he keeps, and his writing, even the gross stuff, is as evocative as anything in Anthony Swofford's gulf war memoir, ``Jarhead."
The movie's coup is 24-year-old Bazzi. Born in Lebanon, raised in New England, he reads the decidedly non conservative magazine The Nation and doesn't seem as gung ho as Moriarty. His feelings seem mixed, in fact: The National Guard helps pay for school. Service doesn't thrill him, but he'll serve with pride.
In many ways, Bazzi is the movie's moral anchor. He points out how absurd it is that the military doesn't provide much education about the region, which leaves the troops disconnected from average Iraqis. His cultural sensitivity and fluent Arabic put him at odds with a few of the men in his company. One says to Bazzi's camera, ``Today, we kill Bazzi and anybody who looks like Bazzi." It's hard to tell how much he's kidding.
All three men see chaotic explosions of violence. But the Guard gets stuck with some mundane details, too. Bazzi watches the dumping of a septic tank, for instance. And a lot of time is spent escorting and baby - sitting supply trucks for the
We learn that, at the mess hall, KBR charges the army $28 per empty plate. The profligacy starts to make Moriarty angry. He's also impatient with the slow pace of the war. As a matter of stir craziness or real fanaticism, he advocates nuking the country. But like a number of troops who show up in the footage, Moriarty turns cynical and increasingly disillusioned about the point of being in Iraq. They suspect that it's more about oil than any freedom.
While the men headed to the Middle East, Scranton stayed in New England and interviewed the women they left behind: Moriarty's wife, Pink's girlfriend, and Bazzi's mother. They give the film emotional counterweight, helping us to better understand their men -- especially Moriarty, whose rah-rah attitude starts to make a different kind of sense.
Before he left, his job as a forklift operator was eliminated. In the meantime, he took care of his kids while his wife went to work, and during his deployment, in his instant messages to her, you get the sense that this tour in Iraq is really redemptive for him. Shrewdly, Scranton sticks around for the homecoming, so we can see how the war ends up leaving Moriarty at a loss in civilian life.
Gradually, the film's moving achievement becomes clear. ``The War Tapes" parries away any direct political agenda and emphasizes, with valiance, three aspects of the conflict's human toll. Scranton commands us to temper any distaste for this war with respect and empathy for the men and women who have to fight it.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. 
