Through soldiers’ eyes

Michael TUCKER, an American who lives in Berlin, first started going to Baghdad in May 2003. “I was making a film about an armored-car salesman who was looking down the road at postwar Iraq,” said Tucker. “Business was booming. We went in twice, delivering cars -- armored Land Cruisers, armored Mercedes -- to Baghdad. The cars would be flown to Amman, Jordan, and we would drive them in.”

May 2003, of course, was the month President Bush, as if in a scene out of “Top Gun,” landed aboard an aircraft carrier and declared that “major combat operations have ended.”

Although Tucker’s film on the car salesman is finished, releasing what he calls a “funny, irreverent movie” about Iraq now would hardly be appropriate. But while Tucker was in Baghdad, he got to know some American soldiers. “We would let them use our satellite phones, and they would give us food.”

And there was a story that Tucker did not believe was being told at the time: The war was not over.

“The insurgency was gaining momentum,” he said. “I went to editors who commission documentaries, who said, ‘Oh, the war is yesterday’s news.” But Tucker, who makes films with his wife, Petra Epperlein -- although she did not travel to Baghdad with him because they have a 9-year-old daughter -- persisted. He had grown up in a military family -- his father served three tours in Vietnam -- and as a boy, he said, “I worshiped combat photographers.”

For him, the war in Iraq was “the only story that matters.”

And so he returned again and again.

The result is “Gunner Palace,” which opens today. It is set on the streets of Baghdad and in Uday Hussein’s former weekend party palace, where close to 400 members of a field artillery unit stationed in Adhamiya, a “volatile neighborhood” in northwest Baghdad, had set up living quarters.

“The palace gave the film a backdrop. It’s very ‘Gone With the Wind,’ ” said Tucker. “Some of the rooms are in rubble. It’s a great metaphor.” Besides, “it was hot at the time, and they had a swimming pool.”

“Gunner Palace” presents the soldiers’ day-in, day-out existence as they move through Baghdad, as they raid houses where insurgents may be harboring weapons, as they visit children in orphanages. At the palace, they have pool parties and compose rap tunes. The tone inside is often that of a frat house, underscoring the poignancy and horror of the scenes outside the palace, as soldiers face the difficult task of trying to do the right thing in a situation that often feels rudderless, in a culture that is increasingly hostile to Americans.

The film moves quickly (Epperlein was its editor); rap music provides a sort of soundtrack, much as rock music did for films of the Vietnam era.

Even before it opened, “Gunner Palace” had stirred controversy. After the Motion Picture Assn. of America slapped an R rating on the film for its profanity, Tucker appealed the rating and won. “I walked into an Army recruitment station when I was 16 and was wearing a uniform at 17,” he noted in a statement. “If young Americans can make decisions like that, then surely they are mature enough to see a film about their peers at war.”

“Gunner Palace” is one of a handful of movies now emerging from Iraq. Feature films include the Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi’s “Turtles Can Fly,” about orphaned children living in a village in Kurdistan in early 2003, waiting for the war to start; the film opened in Los Angeles on Feb. 25.

And like “Gunner Palace,” other documentaries are taking viewers inside a military company. Discovery Times has aired the first three parts of a 10-part series called “Off to War: From Rural Arkansas to Baghdad.” Directed and produced by two brothers from Arkansas, Brent and Craig Renaud, the series follows a National Guard unit through its deployment in Iraq; the remaining parts will be rolled out in the fall.

A film set in Fallujah, “Occupation: Dreamland,” is making the festival circuit. Filmmakers Garrett Scott and Ian Olds set up camp with a unit of soldiers, who are remarkably candid about life in the military and about how their feelings about Iraqis have changed from wanting to help to being distrustful and wary.

Because such filmmakers stay with the military companies for several months, these films, said Josh Siegel, an assistant curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, “show a much more nuanced and complex story than any two-minute nightly news piece could. In that sense, they’re in the tradition of filmmakers like Frederick Wiseman or the Maysles. You’re given access to a point of view that is removed from the official story.”

While the stories told in “Occupation: Dreamland” and “Gunner Palace” are not the official versions, both Scott and Tucker reported few glitches in their access to the military. “The Army was very accommodating,” said Tucker. “The younger soldiers were excited about the movie. The second time I was there, it felt more like their movie than my movie.”

Jon Powers appears briefly in “Gunner Palace”; he was a platoon leader, stationed in Iraq from May 2003 to July 2004. He’s now working as a substitute teacher in Buffalo, N.Y., and traveling around the country with Tucker as they show the film to civilian and military personnel, to schools, to members of Congress.

“When we first got to Iraq, we had a real liberating feeling,” said Powers. “We were optimistic; the Iraqis were optimistic. I was going to dinner at people’s homes. We felt we were making a difference in people’s lives.” But “in November we lost our first guy, Ben Colgan, and that was the turning point. Things started getting pretty hectic.”

“Everyone loved him,” Tucker added.

A roadside bomb exploded, and shrapnel lodged in Colgan’s brain. “The vehicle wasn’t armored. Had it been armored he wouldn’t have died. Every time you’re out driving, it’s like some terrible roulette wheel,” said Tucker.

The palace was often under attack; grenades were thrown over the wall. Living like that “for 14 months, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it’s hard on the psyche,” said Powers, who worries that, back in the U.S., the war is too removed, that it’s being relegated to newspapers’ second pages.

“When I came home, I saw that the media shows such a narrow portion of the war, a blown-up Humvee, the occasional Fallujah firefight. They’re not showing the nightly mortar rounds, or soldiers hoping that a bag of garbage doesn’t blow up. This is not a minor conflict. There’s a full-scale war going on.”