Reel War Reporting
The War Tapes and Shadow Company return reality to the front lines.
By Dana Goldstein, Campus Progress
Monday July 10, 2006
If Fahrenheit 9/11, with its snide, ever-present narrator, is one model for a political documentary, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is another, an earnest lecture hall presentation by the most popular professor on campus. But The War Tapes and Shadow Company, two new documentaries concerned with the war in Iraq, have broken the mold entirely, doing away with the conceit of the omniscient narrator. Instead, these films combine graphic war footage not available on CNN with unflinching analysis of the increasingly depressing situation in Iraq — by soldiers themselves in Deborah Scranton’s The War Tapes and military experts in Nick Bicanic and Jason Bourque’s Shadow Company. Neither war critics nor supporters will find comfort in these documentaries: They present an unflinching look at the horrors perpetrated overseas both in our names and against us. Rather than provide easy answers, The War Tapes and Shadow Company complicate the debate. They should be required viewing for anyone with an opinion on Iraq.
Of the two, The War Tapes is more likely to make a big impact, if only because it eschews the academic style of Shadow Company in favor of an action-packed trip to Iraq with a company of National Guardsmen from New Hampshire. The stomach churning violence of The War Tapes — exploding roadside bombs, human guts spilled on the streets, a young woman’s body ripped apart by an American tank — is likely to both attract audiences and stir controversy, which is probably why the film has secured a distribution deal with SenArt Films and will open nationwide this month.
Despite the Bush administration’s micromanaging of media images of the war, it was the New Hampshire National Guard that originally invited Scranton to make a film of soldiers’ experiences in Iraq. But rather than accept the restrictions of traveling with the troops as a journalist, Scranton chose to “virtually embed,” recruiting a number of soldiers to carry digital video cameras to Iraq and record their missions and downtime. Scranton and editor/producer Steve James then expertly edited the footage down to be the story of three men: Sergeant Zack Bazzi, a Lebanese-American University of New Hampshire student who reads The Nation and is fluent in Arabic; Specialist Mike Moriarty, a mechanic battling recurring depression who signs up for the National Guard after September 11, 2001, leaving behind his wife and two kids; and Sergeant Stephen Pink, a former college journalist and skilled writer who joins to help pay his college tuition bills.
The film charts the 16-month trajectory between the soldiers’ anxious last night in New Hampshire, when, on command, they drop down into the New England snow to make snow angels, through the emotional roller coaster their families ride at home without them, to their own awakenings to the unglamorous realities of war — guarding truckloads of human waste being transported by private contractors, mistaking women and children for insurgents, and training Iraqi police officers who show up for work at “Iraqi 9 a.m.”: sometime before lunch.
Bazzi, Moriarty, and Pink were in Iraq during the 2004 presidential election, and the frank political discussions they capture on film, as well as myriad dead bodies, gushing wounds, pocket pornography, and bombed-out army vehicles, reflect the fact that neither the Pentagon nor the State Department ever provided permission for this film or had access to the footage. The New Hampshire National Guard was “incredibly courageous,” for allowing Scranton unfettered access to the soldiers’ tapes, said War Tapes producer Steve James June 28 at a Washington, D.C., screening sponsored by the Center for American Progress.
While Bazzi says in the film that he was the only soldier in his company to vote for John Kerry for president, none of the three soldiers have a problem critiquing the Bush administration’s management of the war. Moriarty believes more troops are necessary to get the job done, while Bazzi, in an interview with Campus Progress, said, “I completely disagree. If anything, we need less military, and use of more of the diplomatic, political, and financial side of the house. That’s how you nation build.”
Shadow Company focuses in on a recurring tension depicted in The War Tapes: the symbiotic relationship between the U.S. Army and the private companies that have been given an increasing amount of combat, security, and redevelopment responsibility in Iraq. There are currently about 20,000 armed civilian contractors in Iraq — one out of every 10 Americans in Iraq. During the first Iraq war, only one of every 100 Americans was a private contractor.
To illuminate the current trend toward the privatization of war, Shadow Company director Bicanic conducted interviews with dozens of experts, ranging from historians of medieval warfare, to executives of private military companies such as the UK-based Executive Outcomes, to John F. Mullins, a Vietnam-era mercenary who lent his identity to the hit video game Soldier of Fortune. Bicanic never set foot in Iraq to make this film — he told Campus Progress his girlfriend pressured him to stay home for fear he would be kidnapped. But an old college buddy of Bicanic’s from England, James Ashcroft, left the business world to work for a private military company in Iraq. Ashcroft provides some footage from Iraq, including an interview with a masked, self-described “insurgent” who attests to his desire to kill both private contractors and soldiers in an effort to return Iraq to the hands of the Iraqi people.
But the real strength of Shadow Company is in its recounting of the recent history of private warfare. In March 2004, for example, a group of blue-blooded Brits, including former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s son, Mark, offered infamous mercenary Nick du Toit $1 million to overthrow the despotic government of Equatorial Guinea, a nation sitting atop an oil fortune ripe for the taking. Mark Thatcher was fined $500,000 for his participation, while the working class men who volunteered to orchestrate the failed coup from the ground were arrested and are still imprisoned abroad.
Bicanic told Campus Progress he sees Shadow Company as a work of objective journalism, and that the film’s unwillingness to take a strong antiwar stance has contributed to a lack of interest from distribution companies (the film is available online at www.shadowcompanythemovie.com). Nevertheless, Shadow Company ends with the conclusion that something must be wrong when, with 20,000 private military contractors in Iraq, there have been no high-profile criminal prosecutions of private contractors, while hundreds of American soldiers have been charged in military and civilian courts for crimes ranging from theft to rape to murder. As demonstrated by Daniel Bergner in his August 2005 New York Times Magazine article, “The Other Army,” private military contractors are fully accountable neither to the fledgling Iraqi government nor to the American military.
In tandem, Shadow Company and The War Tapes do not lionize or vilify the diverse individuals who represent the United States and its few allies in Iraq. As Sergeant Zack Bazzi says, “I love being a solider; the only bad thing about the army is that you can’t pick your war.” Together, these two films remind us of some of the thorny questions about strategy, economics, and culture that we should ask next time we’re asked to support one.
--------
Comments
|
!
