War Tapes

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/07/02/jasmina_tesanovic_wa.html

War Tapes
"War Tapes" is a 90-minute documentary film. It is cinema verite, composed by three US soldiers in Iraq, and directed, via SMS messages, by Deborah Scranton. Deborah Scranton, the director, knows these soldiers. who returned to the USA in February 2005. Her intention in directing the film was to create a first-hand account off the story or war in Iraq, without her own presence or her own judgments interfering in that risky business of war.
All three of these soldiers are patriots, and proud to be so. The first one is a refugee from Lebanon. He speaks Arabic. He volunteered for military duty in Bosnia, Kosovo, and now Iraq.
He has a philosophy, an agenda: If you are a soldier there is no place for fear. Every soldier wants combat, just like a football player... Iraq, here we come! Life will never be the same. War is not a problem for a soldier, but the fact that he cannot choose his war.

He is not emotional like me, wails his mother, seeing her son after eleven months, alive. He does not want me to be emotional. My baby was in the worst place in the world, but it seems that being a soldier makes him a man.
Is she buying his philosophy, or just coping with it?

Says the second American soldier: When September 11 happened, it seemed as if my own house was hit. I enlisted. I wanted to go immediately to Iraq. My wife will think I am a bad husband, my son that I am a bad father, but I cannot help it. What else can a man do?
His question is a classic patriarchal rhetoric.
Yes, the wife does indeed think he is abandoning her, ruining their lives, and that he will never be the same when he comes back, if he ever does. It happened to him just as she feared. Now her soldier husband is back in America, in therapy, on mood drugs, suffering post traumatic stress...
She testifies: We fight because he lost nerve, lost control... I don’t like this person anymore, but I love him. I cannot live without him.
Another classic, women as warriors' rest.
The third soldier has a girlfriend who wants commitment and a steady job for him once he is back.
"My emotions are my business," he tells the girlfriend, over a drink, with a grim grin... but then he loses his temper. He is remembering his dead pals.
He screams that the Iraqis should be nuked. Then we see how a vehicle hits a local Iraqi girl and smashes her body into irretrievable pieces. He was sent there to protect the local people and bring them democracy... US politics cannot retrieve the military missteps anymore... With his camera, he films the dead bodies, jealous that he did not kill them personally, young Iraqi men, rather like him but from the other side. Smashed by heavy combat, the enemy are not just dead but mutilated. A dog comes along and eats the flesh.
His recitations are like desperate prayer: I was not given orders to kill the dog. Let him eat the bastards, good for him. The soldier looks at the Iraqi kids, playing around him, waving at him, trying to sell him something. He hope these kids stay good and won't turn bad like their older brothers. It will be a better country one day. We must persist. We cannot betray 1800 soldiers who gave their lives already.
Such is his prayer. What about the dead locals, whose casualty numbers have at least two zeros more? All bad people?

"Bush does not know what is going on the ground."
"We are not political."
"We want to take care of our security."
"We lost faith in the media."

Their statements clash with each other, they reduce the artful noise of political manipulation into clear nonsense.

"Everybody is making money in this war, KBR, the government, me, you"...says number three looking straight into the camera.
No, I am not making any money from the war in Iraq, because I am from the third world, maybe the fourth.

The war is a war for oil, not peace... yes, and so so what? We know that our lives could not continue without the oil that's here, everything would blow up... So I am fighting for that oil... says number two.

In Brazil, they use less oil every day. They make fuel from sugarcane. But there is always an excuse for a war. A war for sugarcane, next time.

A close up of spider and a scorpion fighting... The American soldiers commenting, yes that's us. Military troops often take those names, spiders, scorpions ...at least they soldiers know who they are on this bestial planet where most people are more nearly human.

Shots of the junkyard grave of many dead war vehicles. Every one of these machines has its story. As he comments on the wrecks, his voice trembles: this guy whose mother laments that he has no emotions.
In the Iraqi police station the local police are helping out the American soldiers. They say: we are not afraid of dying. We are Muslims. Allah gave us life and he will take it away. A huge blast follows. The camera shakes but we are on again. God is with them, it seems.

My emotions as a Serbian spectator are overwhelming me: I am biased, I am pious. I cannot applaud the artfulness of this handmade film, or celebrate the raw patriotism of this politically-correct American journalist. The Serbian paramilitaries, the "Scorpions," they too filmed their own deeds. Ten years ago it was called patriotism, today it is called war crimes. Ten years from now, who knows how history, Americans, Serbians, Iraqis will judge the ghastly things in this film?

One of the soldiers, who does not want to go back to Iraq, laments that he cannot get attention or respect for his service from his American colleagues at work. They only want snapshots and interesting stories. He loses his temper because he lost their respect.

He wanted to kiss the ground of America when he got back home alive, but he was too tired, too exhausted. He cannot fight anymore, let some other guys continue the war, he says bitterly: "The fear and loneliness I went through..."
"No, I will never understand him", says his wife, "but he will never understand me".
What about those people in Iraq, who have no distant homeland to defend on their own soil, no place to go to leave the war, no films to shoot? Will these three soldiers ever understand them? As one of them explains: the gesture we make to say STOP, in Iraq means HELLO... We call all of them Hadjis, meaning bad Iraqis, and for them to be a Hadji is an honored title a pilgrim acquires for his merits.
This film, a historical document, is missing the truth. My gut aches as I watch it. The American audience can't yet see it, but I understand it only too well: this globalization of the military, this global war on terror, this global war on peace.