Life During Wartime

By David Hudson, GreenCine. Posted August 5, 2004.

Everyone's mind wanders to distant places from time to time, but Michael Tucker is one of those guys who actually gets up and follows his. With a camera. Tucker has shot footage in Asia and America, in Africa and Australia, but over the past year, there's one spot on the globe that's drawn him back again and again, namely, its hottest: Baghdad. Though he's still editing the feature-length documentary that took shape over the course of these extended stays in the scarred and violently festering city, Gunner Palace already has an audience. You might even call it a following.

On June 1, Tucker posted a moving account of his experiences with the 2/3 Field Artillery unit stationed in a palace built for Uday Hussein, one of Saddam's high-living sons. Since the unit has also been referred to as the "Gunner" Battalion, the former den of luxury, now sporting a gaping, ragged hole where a bomb tore through it, it became known as "Gunner Palace." Tucker has also posted two clips from the film and word has spread across the Net like virtual wildfire. It hasn't just been blogs, either. At first, he was hearing from conservatives, the pro-war crowd, thanking him for drawing attention to the sacrifice U.S. soldiers are making in Iraq. The link to his site spread by digital osmosis via mailing lists, online discussion groups and so on, until, eventually, he was hearing from the anti-war side as well, just as appreciative for more or less the same reasons.

The two clips are, interestingly, both musical numbers. In one, a soldier raps about the constant fear of getting hit, about having seen more at the age of 24 than most men see before they're 50. In the other, a specialist armed with an electric guitar cranks out a Hendrix-inspired version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" on the roof while helicopters make their rounds above him. Clearly, these clips have resonated far and wide. There's been a wave of mail via hip-hop sites recently, people writing Tucker to ask for soldiers' addresses so they can send them, among other things, poetry. And then there's "that kid in Michigan who wrote last night, saying that he's posting everywhere he can to make sure people see these clips," says Tucker. These are the ones that fascinate him most. Sure, it's great to be linked to from, say, Daily Kos, but that kid found the site in a forum dedicated to the Minnesota Vikings.

The clips are also indicative of what sets Gunner Palace apart. The U.S. now has around 140,000 troops in Iraq. Since President Bush declared their mission accomplished, nearly 800 have been killed and thousands more wounded. Regardless of where you stand on the war, you've got to wonder what life for these men and women is like day by day – and that's precisely what goes missing on the news and very much what this film goes a long way towards showing us. All politics aside. "I don't even know what my bias is anymore," says Tucker. "My bias has completely changed. I think that sometimes I sound like a raving right-wing lunatic and other times I sound like a raving socialist or something. But I'm trying to make something that's honest. And soldiers have a huge hang-up about it. All they want is for someone to tell the truth. Not embellish it."

Tucker is editing his film in Berlin, where he lives with his architect wife and his eight-year-old daughter. All of this has been hard for them, seeing him haul off to the vortex of what has become a global conflict. "It's been extremely risky," Tucker admits. "No insurance, no nothing. I've had to rely on this German friend of mine who sells armored cars to get in and out safely. It paid off, being careful, because some people have been hurt. Or killed."

The film begins with a quote from Donald Rumsfeld declaring an end to "major combat operations" – which cuts straight into a fire fight, raging four months after that announcement. The terror of this opening sequence is that this is not a succession of rapidly cut well-composed, color-balanced, dramatically lit shots; it's one long one, the result of Tucker running with his camera on from doorway to doorway along a street where the bullets are flying from God-knows-where to God-knows-where. There's no music pumping you up; it would just get in the way.

The series of scenes that follow vary widely in mood and setting. There are parties in Uday Hussein's pool, raids on Iraqi houses, patrols through the streets, meetings with local community leaders preparing them for the June 30 hand-over, a risky trip to Burger King. It takes a while, but begins to sink in: What makes life hell here is the persistent awareness that wherever they are, mortars, IEDs ("improvised explosive devices") or gunfire can come raining down on them at any time. It's the randomness, the unpredictability. And for weeks on end, Tucker lived with them, gaining their trust – his coming from a military family and his own six years as a reservist have helped – and capturing on digital video scenes, opinions and general aspects of their lives they wouldn't share with journalists.

David Hudson writes about movies for Greencine and lives in Berlin.

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