Documentary filmmaker Deborah Scranton '84 provides a rare view into the day-to-day realities of the Iraq war in her film "The War Tapes," which she screened as part of the Watson Institute's War, Peace and the Media Screening Series Wednesday night.
The film is compiled primarily from footage shot by soldiers in Iraq.
Winner of the Best Documentary Feature award at the Tribeca Film Festival this year, the film follows three New Hampshire National Guardsmen from their training at Fort Dix, N.J., through their 16-month deployment based at Baghdad's Camp Anaconda. It concludes with their return home and re-acclimation to civilian life.
Specialist Michael Moriarty, Sergeant Stephen Pink and Sergeant Zack Bazzi served as convoy security for supply trucks run by KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary contracted by the U.S. government to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure. The soldiers' experiences run between the vulgar playfulness of army camaraderie to the terrifying insecurity of life in war-torn Iraq, characterized by the constant threat of violence from the insurgency.
The footage they captured provides an often shockingly immediate view both of combat and the tense time in between.
Interviews Scranton conducted with the women the three soldiers left behind - a wife, a girlfriend and a mother - show the war's impact in America, while excerpts from news coverage provide a timeline of major events in the war coinciding with the soldiers' 2004 tour of duty.
After Scranton was offered a position as an embedded journalist within the New Hampshire National Guard in Iraq two years ago, she decided instead to "virtually embed" by giving the soldiers cameras to film their experiences themselves. "I wanted to tell the story from the inside out, as opposed to the outside in," she said.
She corresponded with the soldiers via e-mail and instant messages, keeping track of their activities and absorbing their experiences. It took two weeks for the finished tapes they sent to travel from Iraq to her home in New Hampshire.
Scranton said she wanted the film to convey the experience of the war to Americans who are far removed from it. "There is a great disconnect in this war between those who know a soldier and those who don't," she said. "I wanted to help (those who don't) empathize and ... show that soldiers aren't just ciphers in uniform."
The film refrains from taking a political stance on the war, deferring instead to the soldiers' diverse and often complex opinions.
While Pink and Moriarty support the war and President George W. Bush, Bazzi, who emigrated from Lebanon at age 10 and speaks Arabic with Iraqis, questions "the whole Bush macho 'let's kick ass' thing.'"
All three oscillate between enthusiasm for military service and confusion about their role in Iraq, questioning in particular the efficacy of the operation and the motivation of KBR.
The War, Peace and the Media Screening Series brings media of various types addressing security, economy and other international issues to the University. Series co-coordinator Eugene Jarecki, a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute and an award-winning documentary filmmaker in his own right, said "The War Tapes" represents "tectonic shifts happening in the medium of the documentary."
"We're now in a marketplace of ideas driven by young people on YouTube, carrying out a new set of realities for what it means to make media," he said. "What people capture with their own cameras has more integrity ... than the little information we get on TV between toothpaste commercials."
