When it's over, you're not any closer to understanding the war. What stays with you are three sobering and complicated examples of its effect on the troops.
A few years ago, the New Hampshire National Guard offered Scranton an opportunity to go to Iraq as an embed. She declined but got permission to let the troops film themselves, training them to use the cameras.
Ten volunteered. Five wound up shooting, and Scranton, who edited the picture with Leslie Simmer and the seasoned documentary director Steve James, constructs the bulk of the film around three of them -- Specialist Mike Moriarty and Sergeants Steve Pink and Zack Bazzi.
They leave for Iraq in separate units and different states of mind.
The oldest of the three at 34, Moriarty is pumped. (He tidily describes himself as ``substantially patriotic.") Having barely missed service in the first Gulf War, he sees this trip as one he needs to make, even though his wife, understandably, wants him home with her and their kids.
Pink is 10 years younger, and his serious attraction to the morbid makes him natural for a war -- or at least war in a Sam Fuller picture. In Iraq, he reads from the journal he keeps, and his writing, even the gross stuff, is as evocative as anything in Anthony Swofford's gulf war memoir, ``Jarhead."
The movie's coup is 24-year-old Bazzi. Born in Lebanon, raised in New England, he reads the decidedly non conservative magazine The Nation and doesn't seem as gung ho as Moriarty. His feelings seem mixed, in fact: The National Guard helps pay for school. Service doesn't thrill him, but he'll serve with pride.
In many ways, Bazzi is the movie's moral anchor. He points out how absurd it is that the military doesn't provide much education about the region, which leaves the troops disconnected from average Iraqis. His cultural sensitivity and fluent Arabic put him at odds with a few of the men in his company. One says to Bazzi's camera, ``Today, we kill Bazzi and anybody who looks like Bazzi." It's hard to tell how much he's kidding.
