War told in depth ... and in French

In the age of the sound bite, the art of storytelling often gets lost. The Paris-based CAPA press and television agency regularly supplies war footage to U.S. news stations. But what Americans don’t see are its nearly hourlong, commercial-free, magazine-style network TV documentaries that are as much a part of the French current-events diet as the news. French broadcasters not only show images of war that are rarely seen on American airwaves, but they take time to tell the complex human stories behind the images.

Some of this year’s most memorable reporting from Iraq is the work of a 28-year-old French American television reporter named Diego Bunuel. The half-dozen features that he has filed since the beginning of the war have appeared on prominent national newsmagazines on France’s major channels. Bunuel has followed Marines scrambling to restore order in Baghdad and the team that tracked (and eventually caught) Saddam Hussein. He is currently on the Syrian border, recording the daily grind of war on young Marines.

In these sensitively observed, simply told war stories, the action does not take place on the battlefield, but in the wings. The grandson of the legendary Spanish surrealist film director Luis Bunuel, the French-born reporter comes from a long line of distinguished storytellers. A graduate of Northwestern University, Bunuel trained as a newspaper reporter in the U.S. before joining the international desk of CAPA in 2001.

Bunuel and a cameraman were in Iraq hoping to get embedded when the U.S. Army gave them one slot. Bunuel took the camera off his cameraman’s shoulder and called his boss, who encouraged him to learn how to use it, and follow his nose to a good story. The result was “Desert Kings,” about Mohammad Arkawazi, a 38-year-old former Iraqi soldier who returned from 10 years of U.S. exile as a CIA-trained Free Iraqi Forces interpreter. Bunuel followed Arkawazi and Marine reservists working to help the civilian population, including Gunnery Sgt. Ed Maximian, a 45-year-old LAPD officer and Gulf War vet acting as Arkawazi’s armed bodyguard; the jeep’s driver, a 24-year-old Marine reservist, Sgt. Mirek Andreczjak, who reluctantly left behind his marketing studies in California after being called up; and the leader of the group, Maj. Mark Stainbrook, a 34-year-old LAPD officer who left his job on the gang beat and pregnant wife at home.

“I just told their story as they went through the war,” says Bunuel, who followed the men for the first month of the conflict. “There’s this big machine which is the American military, and within that are these guys trying to make things right. And there’s such a culture difference, it’s like ‘Star Trek’ landing.” While the Marines put 150 fallen Iraqi soldiers in U.S. body bags, Arkawazi uses a compass to find Mecca and calls a friend in the U.S. to check the words of a funeral prayer. Burying the dead soon becomes a luxury, and Arkawazi is increasingly torn between helping his adopted country’s troops and the Iraqi civilians whose lives have been turned upside down by the invasion.

When the Marines arrive in a village they plan to convert into a base, the Iraqis serve them tea and bring them water to wash the sand off their faces. Within the hour, the visibly sheepish soldiers have handed them $500 in cash and packed them into a truck heading out of town.

In another scene, an Iraqi whose house has been looted suggests that the Americans who got him into this situation get him out of it, then looks dumbfounded when the major earnestly suggests that he recruit some young guys to defend his property with sticks. “I’ll probably leave a bad taste in some of their mouths,” Stainbrook says remorsefully. “They think we have the ability to do everything, but we don’t.”

In a report shot along the Syrian border last October, Bunuel followed freshly debarked members of the 82nd Airborne Division. By this time, Americans had come to be seen not as liberators, but an occupation force. When the soldiers decide to make a command center of a temporarily empty house, they waste no time moving its few possessions into the courtyard and knocking down walls. When the owner comes home and asks where he and his family are supposed to live, the interpreter answers: “I don’t know -- don’t you have neighbors?”

Later, four soldiers take a cigarette break under a palm tree. “I don’t care if those Iraqis die,” says one, a newlywed whose best friend had been killed the week before, in an approximation of how these American soldiers talk when you clean up the four-letter words. “And if they start ... all over again, just come over here again and turn the whole place into a parking lot,” says another. “From the air,” says another. “From the air, yeah,” he answers with a smirk.

It was in part this cartoon soldier talk that caught the attention of a French media review program called “Arret sur Images,” which invited Bunuel to join in a discussion about filming soldiers. Like those whose allegiance is more to the world than to any single nation, Bunuel was not taking sides. But he cautioned against being too quick to judge the young Marines.

“It was important for me to defend these guys,” Bunuel says, “because these are the words of soldiers who are 18 to 20 years old, who don’t know anything about anything except playing Nintendo and shooting M-16 weapons. They are trying to live through this. I think that if there’s anyone to blame, it’s the people who put them in the situation.”

Contrasting the media

It’s hard to know if American troops appear more candid on French television because they are less inhibited about talking to foreign reporters, or because the French media are less inhibited about reporting a more candid version of the news. “American reporters were always asking the soldiers: ‘Oh, hi, how are you? Where are you from?’ ” Bunuel says. “It’s like, guys, we’re in a war. They do sometimes ask hard questions, but there’s a courteousness. I mean these are soldiers -- you don’t need to be holding their hands.”

But it doesn’t hurt to hang out with them, he says: “Usually before speaking to these guys I spent three days somewhere in a hangar playing cards with them. Combat troops are very tight units. You have to be very respectful and low key and slowly wait for them to come and get you.”

On “Arret sur Images,” Ivan Cerieix, who produces television documentaries for the Paris-based SAYA agency, said that soldiers nickname him “the little Frenchie,” letting their guards down possibly thinking he doesn’t understand everything. Bunuel’s English, on the other hand, is spy-perfect, without a trace of the French accent that many half-American children growing up in France never seem to shake. “I always say, ‘I’m not your friend, I’m a reporter, this is what I’m looking to show,’ ” Bunuel says. But did the troops forget that they were talking to a half-French reporter? “The freedom I get from our conversations is directly linked to my ability to understand American culture, to have lived it,” Bunuel admits. “The U.S. is a country where people recognize each other through baseball, football, TV series, nightly news, comedy hour, cartoons, magazines. These things form the recognition that I am dealing with someone from my tribe.”

Bunuel’s father was born in Paris, grew up in the United States and Mexico and met his Russian American wife in New York. His parents, both movie directors, lived in the U.S. and Mexico before settling in Paris, where Bunuel was born. His famous grandfather died eight years later. “It was very clear early on that movies were something I didn’t want to go into because everyone in the family did it, had been doing it, was going to do it,” he says. “Journalism very rapidly appealed to me -- especially print. I was not at all a TV person.”

Northwestern was a real culture shock, he says: “I was expecting university to be like Oxford -- reciting Chaucer poems under a tree or something. I show up and it’s Lollapalooza and Birkenstocks and big sweatshirts and, you know, ‘Dude!’ ” He soon fell into the international crowd, leaving his all-American schoolmates to join fraternities and discover the wonders of alcohol, sex and political correctness.

He failed freshman writing

Bunuel grew up speaking English, but this high school valedictorian failed his freshman writing class the first time around. During a surprise phone interview for a summer internship at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, he was asked what he knew about the city. “The only thing I knew about New Orleans was what I had seen in a movie called ‘The Big Easy,’ ” he says. “So I just spilled out the whole scenario -- police corruption, racism, drug deals. They said, ‘You really did your research.’ ” He got the job, and loved the work.

“In France if you have an internship, you make coffee and shuffle paper all day. I went to the U.S. and in my first job I had a front-page story with my name on it -- spelled correctly!” The following summers, he interned at the San Francisco Examiner, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Chicago Tribune and the Miami Herald. After graduation, he worked happily as a crime reporter for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, using the Spanish he learned visiting his grandfather in Mexico.

But three years later, destiny intervened in the form of a call from the French Army. After being informed that he would be banned from entering France if he didn’t report immediately for military service, he sold his belongings and left behind a big story -- the Elian Gonzalez story -- that became international news.

Bunuel got his first taste of war reporting covering Bosnia and Herzegovina for the French Army press corps. Disenchanted with French print media -- which tend to value interpretation over reporting -- he found that CAPA’s documentary-like style, in which journalists do not appear on camera, allowed him to combine “the rigorousness of American print media with this really interesting way of telling stories in television. I like that the reporter doesn’t exist -- that you are right there with people in lively situations, and the trick is to drop the right question as the action develops.”

Bunuel has full editorial control over his work -- filming, writing and editing everything himself. “In Iraq, the Americans were like, ‘But -- you’re not on camera?’ ” Of course, it’s hard to imagine that any American television producer would allow the remarkably handsome Bunuel to stay behind the camera. But he’s not interested: “It’s this guy’s story, not my story.”

English-language versions of Bunuel’s work have been broadcast in Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. But the French haven’t been able to sell Americans these fearless glimpses of their own war. “A lot of people over there, soldiers included, feel that they shouldn’t be over there,” Bunuel says. “One said in my report, ‘If I had troops in my hometown walking through my house, I’d probably pick up a gun and shoot them also.’ That kind of information that would speak to American people, that would make them understand what’s going on in Iraq, is muted. Maybe by the channel, maybe by the editor, and maybe by the reporter in the field who doesn’t ask the right questions. I don’t know what every American reporter did and did not do. But I think there’s self-censorship, especially in television.”

In one report, a 24-year-old lieutenant looks straight into the camera when describing the difficulty of teaching armed boys of 17 to make split-second decisions about whether to open fire, “to recognize that not everyone is the enemy here.” Has he killed anyone himself? “Have I personally?” he responds, looking stricken. “I don’t know. I’ve pulled my trigger. I’ve pulled my trigger along with a bunch of other guys. And at the end of it, there were five individuals dead. And so ... I don’t know.”

He says that surviving as a soldier requires holding onto one’s blind faith. “Are we doing the right thing here?” he asks, raising an eyebrow, while what looks like skepticism flushes his young, open face. “Yeah, I’ve got to believe that we are.”