COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: General
Anywhere But Here
STUART KLAWANS, The Nation
October 10, 2005
Although Occupation: Dreamland was filmed entirely in Falluja, only
two of its three main settings are Iraqi. Those places are the
shadowless streets, their bleached yellow walls huddling together on
a dusty plain, seen in long shot during daylight hours; and the murky
interiors of houses, shot after sundown with a nightscope to yield
shaky, close-up, glowing-green views. The third principal setting, by
contrast, might as well be a lamp-lit American dormitory, cluttered
with rumpled beds and wallpapered with pinup photos. This is the
barracks of the 82nd Airborne's Alpha Company, 1/505.
Here the soldiers feel sufficiently at home to talk about their
discomfort--their contempt, despair and rage--at stepping into
foreign spaces. "I was never out of the country before, except for
booze runs to fuckin' Mexico," marvels Pfc. Thomas Turner, expressing
a commonly held sense of disbelief. Like many of his buddies, he says
he never imagined that enlistment in the Army would result in his
being sent to someplace strange and dangerous. You have no cause to
doubt that his frayed ingenuousness is real, or that Sgt. Eric Forbes
is voicing an equally common response to this posting when he says of
Falluja, "I hate these people."
Forbes makes that comment soon after a fellow soldier has died in a
roadside bombing, so you may take the remark as no more than
situational. Forbes seems to have no existential loathing for Iraqis--
in fact, he describes them as caught haplessly in the way, as the
United States lunges for oil--but whatever hostility he's sparked in
Falluja, he will return it, and with twice the firepower. At their
most gung-ho, soldiers like Forbes think of combat as a release from
the tension of policing the Iraqis. "I like bein' shot at. It makes
it interesting," claims Staff Sgt. Ryan Mish, who says that
sometimes "I just want to light everybody up." On the more mature end
of the scale, the soldiers regard the occupation as an end in itself,
self-perpetuating and self-enclosed. "What are we securing here?"
asks Capt. Terence Caliguire at a staff briefing. "We're securing
essentially ourselves. So what are we protecting? I don't know."
Shot in January and February 2004 by Garrett Scott and Ian Olds, this
admirably direct and spare documentary is the second feature released
this year to record the lives of American soldiers in Iraq. It
follows Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker's Gunner Palace, which was
shot in Baghdad at almost the same time (autumn 2003-winter 2004),
and which focused on soldiers in the 2/3 Field Artillery. At the risk
of sounding heartless, I will describe Gunner Palace as the more
entertaining of the films. It dwells on the surrealism of the Field
Artillery's having billeted itself in a bombed-out pleasure palace,
and it makes the most of the soldiers' desire to play to the camera.
Freestyle rappers, poets and platoon flakes are much in evidence.
Also, while it presents a thoroughly unsentimental view of the war,
Gunner Palace gives a varied account of the occupiers. You sometimes
see them trying hard to help Iraqis; you witness moments of
generosity and even tenderness.
Occupation: Dreamland is a drier experience, and a more somber one.
Its lightest scene records how one GI tries good-heartedly to
converse in phrase-book Arabic, despite getting stuck at "Salaam
aleikum." In a more touching sequence, Spc. Patrick Napoli uses an
Army manual to drill his squad in sign language. The soldiers work
hard at it, and Napoli expresses pride in momentarily being a leader.
But he adds, "I'm in Iraq. It's a little late for a sign language
class."
That's as hopeful as it gets in Occupation: Dreamland, a picture in
which most of the soldiers admit to having enlisted for lack of
anything better to do, and now find they have nothing to look forward
to other than self-preservation. Why the sense of futility? The
reason becomes clear whenever Arabs take over the scene (as they
never do in Gunner Palace), to deliver extended, impromptu street
tirades against the occupation. They shout at the soldiers through an
overburdened interpreter, and they shout at the filmmakers, too.
You're not in Baghdad any longer, the men warn. "This is Falluja. Be
careful of Falluja."
And why should the foreigners be careful of this particular place? On
this subject, Occupation: Dreamland is silent, Scott and Olds having
chosen to present only what they recorded themselves, during one
slice of time. So, if you rely solely on the words spoken in the
film, you might conclude that Falluja is populated by principled
anticolonialists, or perhaps tradition-bound paternalists. (There was
much outrage on the streets, when Scott and Olds were in town, about
the Americans having taken a woman into custody.) On the other hand,
if you've absorbed some of the news media's standard phrases about
Falluja--Sunni Triangle, Baath loyalists--you might write off much of
the anger as the rage of a corrupt minority at losing power.
Or perhaps you know more. Maybe you've read of how Saddam Hussein
wasn't all that fond of Falluja, whose clerics had been annoyingly
independent. Maybe you can even remember how Falluja, though
correspondingly cool toward Saddam, became a center of insurgency. In
April 2003, just three weeks after US tanks entered Baghdad, American
troops opened fire on a protest march in Falluja, killing a reported
fifteen people and wounding seventy-five. After that, the citizens
were dead set against Americans--a piece of information that was
highly relevant to Alpha Company, and might be relevant to your
understanding of its soldiers, but cannot be gleaned from Occupation:
Dreamland.
In short, you have to bring your own context to the picture, which is
that much poorer for its own stinginess. I would not stress this
complaint, except that every record we can get of the occupation is
crucial. Fighting is no longer beamed into everyone's living room as
it was during the Vietnam War. The pictures are now available mostly
to the funny people who visit art houses and rent obscure DVDs, or
who might tune in to a premium cable channel that's showing Gunner
Palace or Occupation: Dreamland. Precisely because this core audience
is limited, the information in the documentaries shouldn't be. Every
new viewer who stumbles across these films is statistically
significant.
That said, Scott and Olds can claim the integrity of having given you
just what they saw and heard themselves during six weeks in residence
with Alpha Company. The material may be fragmentary and ambiguous by
nature, but it was hard won, and it has an undeniable force. This is
what it's like to be bored, itchy, angry, isolated, underprepared and
far outnumbered among a foreign people who hate you. This is what
many of us art-house types will never know firsthand.
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