There are no proper terms for our war in Iraq. Bogged down by death and confusion, we trundle on, hoping for the best but not knowing when, if ever, we will be able to get out. The conflict has often been referred to as a modern-day Vietnam; in Errol Morris’ The Fog of War a few years ago Robert McNamara talked about how, the more involved troops became in Vietnam, the more it seemed like burrowing down a rabbit hole, and how he could see the same thing happening now.
What does this have to do with The War Tapes? Both everything and nothing at once.
Deborah Scranton’s film, produced by Steve James (Hoop Dreams), takes a relatively simple premise and spins out documentary gold. A group of New Hampshire National Guard men are given digital video cameras and told to film their year-long tour of duty in Iraq. The majority of the movie is the footage that they collected, and Scranton’s film focuses on three of the men in particular.
One of the first shots that we get of Mike Moriarty is him playing with the fat under his chin. Motivated by the 9/11 attacks and a desire to be somebody’s hero, he left a wife and young child behind to serve in the war. We gradually learn that he has a history of depression, and in one scene we see Instant Messages to his wife describing his need for people to see him as brave; we reflect on the fact that he needed the Army to make him feel that way.
Zack Bazzi is younger than Moriarty; born in Lebanon, he came over to the US with his parents when he was ten to escape a civil war and lives with his protective mother both before and after Iraq. He is intelligent and skeptical (at one point we see him reading the Nation with a George Bush parody on the cover), but his attitude is that he got the call, and so, is bound by duty to serve his country.
Steve Pink is bitter and cynical; at one point, after his patrol is featured in the news, he says, “I feel exploited and proud at the same time.” We learn from his girlfriend that, while terse in face-to-face encounters, he shows his true feelings through writing, and the film grants us access to his journals as he describes an increasing disillusionment with his role in the war.
The soldiers are housed together in an area where mortar shells go off near them every day; throughout the film, there is a pervading sense of the fear that
