Gunner Palace--The Sanitized War

I went to see the documentary "Gunner Palace" over the weekend and felt a need to write about it. First of all, I have to give major credit to filmmaker Michael Tucker of Seattle for having the guts to go make this film and live for two months with a group of U.S. troops (2nd Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment or "2/3 Field Artillery") where mortar fire and other threats were part of the daily routine. Also, my respect for what the troops live with in Iraq and in other combat zones has only gone up because obviously it is not pleasant or easy to face every day.

Here's how Michael Tucker put it: "I walked into “Gunner Palace” in September 2003 with a simple desire to tell the soldiers’ story - to capture what we didn’t see on the news. To do so, I left my personal opinions and my preconceptions about the war at the gate and tried to get as close to the subject as possible. I looked at the subject not as news, but as living history; an experience, not an event."

I do think this film is valuable and tells a story that needed to be told. And Tucker probably believes that he was being as objective as possible. Having said that, and despite what the filmmaker claims, I think this is actually a very sanitized version of what is really going on, and evidence of this is present on the website for the film at www.gunnerpalace.com. One reason I say this is because there is virtually no blood shown in the whole film, only discussion of how it looks "black on concrete" by the soldiers at one point. We are told that several members of the 2/3 have been killed along the way, and there are memorials alluded to for these lost soldiers, but again we see no direct evidence so we remain one step removed. Tucker includes the following exchange after a screening of the film in Tampa on his website:

"A man in the back wondered why we didn't see more blood in the film--more evidence of suffering. I explained to him the reality I filmed: a place where you are neck deep in violence, you hear blasts night and day; firefights, the pleas of a squad under attack on the radio, but you are often not there. The film captures what I experienced, and only what I experienced while on routine patrols and raids. In the time when we were producing the film, 8 people connected to 2/3 FA were killed. Enough violence to last a lifetime."

However, elsewhere on the same site, in his diary, he includes the following:

"Iraqi Police and American MPs were wounded. I joined the Quick Reaction Force lining up to investigate the scene. As we waited for the order to roll, the wounded came in. One was a young female National Guard soldier. The IED exploded right in front of her. She took shrapnel everywhere—including one eye. Her fellow MPs spent the night in the Palace. In normal life they are policemen, mechanics and lawyers. Here, as they staggered into the Palace to bed down, they were soldiers—their T-shirts covered in blood, many of them shaking with grief."

He apparently witnessed this scene, yet in the film we see none of the details described. Now, I am not anxious to see the blood of real people by any means, but I can't help but wonder where his video camera was at this point, and why the footage wasn't included if he did film it. It just seems to play into other images we get of Iraq here in the U.S.--very sanitized as if Big Brother were filtering out all disturbing images for public consumption.

Tucker made a tour of the U.S. to prescreen the film earlier this year, and he appears to have chosen areas of the country where there is a large military presence. I can't help but think that he is pandering to the military in some way, trying to please them first and foremost. Maybe they deserve this attention, but it seems to indicate that Tucker's loyalty lies firmly in their camp and he may have gone out of his way to make a film that pleases them more than it challenges the reasons they are being sent there in the first place.

Despite my comments, I still found GP to be very moving in many different instances. Tucker befriends a young soldier from Colorado Spring named Stuart Wilf who plays electric guitar and cracks a lot of inane jokes. Wilf is the kind of guy I can relate to, and as the film wore on I couldn't help fearing that at some point we would be told that Wilf had been killed in the line of duty. Fortunately, that was not the case and on the movie's website there is a more recent photo of Wilf enjoying civilian life back in Colorado, very much alive and well. Of course, many others have not been so lucky, and I am very sorry for them and their families. So I think this film does put a human face on the war in Iraq in terms of helping us get to know our own soldiers better.

We also see Iraqis in the film, some being arrested on suspicion of bomb-building and other charges, and some helping the U.S. troops carry out their extremely hazardous duties. I found this aspect of the film to be perhaps the most compelling, and I would like to hear much more from the Iraqi perspective--something else that it feels like the current U.S. administration does not want us to hear. The bottom line is that this film is a starting point, and Tucker deserves credit for kicking off the conversation, but there are a lot of stones still standing ominously in the middle of the road, as yet very much unturned.

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