I went to see an incredible documentary last night titled: The War Tapes. A friend of mine, and everywhere activist, [and one of the people in BooMan’s meeting with Warner yesterday] Alex was involved with the film and managed to get a print down to Philly for a special screening. And as an added treat, he brought one of the film’s main characters and cameramen, Staff Sergeant Zack Bazzi, to the screening for a Q&A session afterwards. All the proceeds from the screening went to the Lt. Paul Rieckhoff headed Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America [IAVA] fund.
The film has been getting glowing reviews [The Nation, SF Chronicle, NYT], it took first prize at the Tribeca Film Festival for best documentary and I can’t say enough about it myself. Director Deborah Scranton was given the chance to be embedded with the New Hampshire national guard, but chose not to. Instead, she asked if she could give cameras to the guardsmen themselves and have them shoot what they saw and send the tapes back to the U.S. periodically. The film was primarily shot by 10 NH national guardsmen who were stationed in Iraq in 2004-2005. Some 500 hours of digital video was shot on the provided camcorders in Iraq with an additional 200 hours of footage of the families they left behind and additional scenes upon their return home.
The film is in no way a pro-war/anti-war nor a pro-Bush/anti-Bush film. It is a film that is raw and unpolished. It shows the mundane periods of time in between mortar attacks and the sometimes surprised, sometimes eerily calm reactions during the attacks. It shows the frantic nature of a check of a seemingly abandoned house turning into a firefight with the tat-tat-tat-tat of AK-47s and the thud of 50 caliber Humvee-mounted returning fire. The camera jostling from side to side, everything a blur, but the sound coming through crystal clear.
The film has been rolling out nationwide and opens where I am, Philly, to the general public on Friday. Check out the schedule for the film coming to a theater near you. If it isn’t, I’m sure it will come out on DVD very soon available for purchase or rental.
I’ll leave it to the pros for all out reviews of the film, they’re everywhere and I’ve pointed to three above. Below the fold, I’ve transcribed/paraphrased as best I could the Q&A session which followed the film. It was a treat to have Staff Sergeant Zack Bazzi, a Lebanese-born, Arabic-fluent, my-age, NH National Guardsman with us for a Q&A session immediately after the film. He is incredibly articulate and a self-admitted political junkie who subscribes to The Nation, but puts his personal politics aside to fight in this war.
Q: What are the reasons an intelligent person to enlist in the Army these days with all the evidence that this war is wrong?
A: I was probably just an easy target as I enlisted at 18. People have all kinds of different reasons for enlisting whether it be financial, educational or to be able to travel all over the world. Being in the Army is the best job in the country right now with the best camaraderie. It’s an incredible melting pot of race, geographical location, politics – or lack thereof. Some do it for the educational benefits, some for the veteran’s benefits afterwards. One group which does not enlist are the trust fund kids, they definitely don’t, that socio-economic class is missing.
Q: What is your reaction and the reaction of the soldiers there in regards to Halliburton’s war profiteering?
A: I’m not mad at them. I have bigger things to worry about like the soldiers I’m responsible for [as a sergeant]. The Army cannot expand right at the time of war to take on all the duties of catering, laundry, transport… The use of private contractors, KBR among them, is useful and necessary. And they’re getting killed too, it’s no free ride.
Q: Having Arabic as your native language, after speaking with the Iraqis, what is their view of us?
A: First off, don’t ever believe anything people from the administration or Generals say, it’s PR spin. Those people cannot possibly know how the Iraqis feel. Iraq is not a country as we understand the word. Iraq is three nations: the Kurds in the north, Shi’a in the south and Sunnis in the middle. They are all a tribal people and while they may dislike and even hate each other, they value the notion of revenge even more. The adage of “Me and my cousin vs. the enemy, but me and my brother vs. my cousin” holds true here.
Q: What do you think about the notion of calling what’s going on there now a Civil War?
A: It’s a low-grade Civil War going on over there right now. There is still a minimal level of governmental functioning there. But if we were to pull out overnight, it would evolve into an all out Civil War.
Q: What do you think of the Iraqi Constitution?
A: [I didn’t catch the beginning of his response] …Sunnis have nothing and are fighting for a more centralized government. The oil is north and south with nothing worth anything in the Sunni’s mid-Iraq area. With a centralized government and a proper revenue sharing plan, the Sunnis would be happy.
Q: What do you hope to accomplish through this documentary?
A: Realistically, to shatter the myth of the monolithic soldier. That all soldiers are different and diverse and representative of the general American population. We’re not all some stereotype.
Q: How did you handle the camera while in the middle of all that hectic action?
A: Sergeant Pink, who is a skilled carpenter [his actual profession], helped to construct a makeshift camera mount for the dashboard of the Humvee allowing me to mount the camera before we left the safety of the base. Only when we were in relatively safe areas did I shoot with the camera in my hand.
Q: Compare the possible carnage in Iraq following a troop withdrawal with what actually happened in Vietnam.
A: Vietnam was a much simpler war with all Vietnamese being Vietnamese, one race, one ethnicity. In Iraq, you have the Kurds, Shi’a and Sunni with long standing histories between them all; that alone complicates things a lot. If we were to withdraw, Turkey, the only Muslim nation member of the U.N. and U.S. ally, would immediately invade the Kurdish land in the north; Iran would invade the Shi’a south. The end result would be like Somalia with military fiefdoms taking root.
Q: There is so much money being poured into wars overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan while education programs here in America are not properly funded [rambled on without really asking a question…]
A: I’m not going to get into the political rights and wrongs – everyone is entitled to their opinion. Bill O’Reilly’s opinion is no more valid than Michael Moore’s – each has the right, as an American – to voice their opinion as they see fit and each American has their own valid points to make.
Q: Was there anything left on the cutting room floor or didn’t even make it to the editing room as a result of military censorship?
A: As far as I know, the only tape [out of ~500 hours of footage from Iraq] to not get clearance to be in the film was one where Sergeant Pink takes his camera onto the battlefield after a firefight with several Iraqis and proceeds to yell [presumably racial slurs] at the corpses. We were lucky in that the tapes did not have to go through the Department of Defense. The tapes were simply all sent back to the NH National Guard offices and were cleared by their internal PR office. If the DoD were the ones giving the okay, there would’ve been much more footage lost. We were lucky in that it was the NH National Guard’s PR office which had the final word.
