March 24-30, 2005

movies

Riding Shotgun

dressed to kill: Spc. Tom Susdorf in Gunner Palace.

Gunner Palace tags along with American troops in Iraq.

by Cindy Fuchs

The members of the 2/3 Field Artillery — or, as they're better known, the Gunners — know they're lucky, relatively speaking. They're in Baghdad's Adhamiya district, stationed at one of Uday Hussein's bombed-out pleasure palaces. Each patrol might be their last, but they have access to a swimming pool and putting green. Each raid of a suspected insurgent's home or bump-up against an edgy civilian on the street might be fatal. But they're alive, for now, and that's more than too many of their fellows can say.

In the remarkable Gunner Palace, Mike Tucker and his partner/wife Petra Epperlein document two one-month stints with the 2/3. Tucker's voiceover introduces some scenes, expresses the soldiers' conditions (with the end of "major combat," they now face deadly and daily "minor combat"), and explains some terms (an IED is an improvised explosive device, typically left roadside in a plastic bag or a can). As the film tells it, the soldiers get by day to day, menaced by unknowable forces and abandoned by an abstract "nation" back home (distinct from their solidly supportive families, themselves frustrated by lack of communication from the military).

"When those guns start blazing and our friends get hit," raps Spc. Richmond Shaw, one of several freestylers in the documentary. "That's when our hearts start racing and our stomachs get woozy / 'Cause for y'all this is just a show but we live in this movie." The troops know how to fight and kill ("These guys were trained to stop a Russian advance," observes one officer. "They live to blow stuff up."), but they're not quite prepared for policing or training Iraqis to police each other.

Gunner Palace reflects their sense of dislocation in its own herky-jerky rhythms. Neither gung ho nor anti-war, the soldiers just want to survive, and Tucker's camera rolls with them. Many are young and passionate; life in Baghdad is part gonzo adventure, part deathly boredom, part waking nightmare. Asked "what's so great about this place," Spc. Stuart Wilf — pale, skinny, a Hendrix fan — answers readily: "Lovely sights, happy people. And I've got a gun."

As their nickname indicates, their weapons define the 2/3's sense of mission and identity. They spend their nights on "Rough Rider" raids (looking for weapons or enemy planners), while their days are comprised of patrolling or efforts at "civic" work. They train the Iraqi National Guard, teach Iraqi women to shoot, go to hospitals where they hold babies and hand out SpongeBob dolls. It's telling that the troops are so easily distracted by immediate minicrises, like a rat in the bunk area. "Dude," asserts one man in sober pursuit of the intruder, "it was in my bag!" Managing the small stuff makes the more daunting catastrophes seem like more of the same, as if they might be contained, one moment at a time.

The patrols can be mundane or erupt suddenly into trouble, as when a bomb explodes and a 2/3 team arrives to investigate. "The crowd is getting angry, not because the bomb went off, but because we're there," Tucker observes. The folks on the ground begin to throw rocks, and the troops back off, not wanting to incite more emotion. "That motherfucker almost hit me!" cries one soldier. And the convoy decides to leave. You have to pick your battles, and this one just isn't one worth escalating.

Lied to by their informants — prisoners or invited sheiks — the soldiers understand but can't help but feel frustrated. Gunner Palace thematizes the hopelessness of locating a single truth, providing a series of contexts from jokes about the U.S. administration and U.S. media reports to solemn veneration of the soldiers' own ambiguous narratives. It takes seriously soldier-rappers like Moncrief (featured in The New York Times Style section) and doesn't try to explain or sum up his feelings.

In part, the film achieves such critique by evoking the images that have shaped the troops' (and your) expectations, then dismantling them. From Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket to reality TV, the allusions in Gunner Palace underline the impossibility of comprehension and the need for sincere effort toward that end anyway. As Tucker notes, even his time in Iraq doesn't make his story representative; he only uses it as a means to tell the troops' stories, however incompletely.

On occasion, the kids on patrol resemble the figures in Cops, dark and unreadable in handheld frames. The shots reflect their immersion in an utterly strange environment, briefly interrupted by traces of home (laptops, months-old magazines, video games) or the death of their fellows. When one is killed early on, his friends gather to console each other, quoting scripture (John 15:13, "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends") and remembering the broad outlines of their guy's courage and commitment. And then they head out. "Maybe this whole war thing will never end," says Wilf. The glimpse of "this whole war thing" offered in Gunner Palace makes you wish more than ever that it might.

Gunner Palace Directed by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein A Palm Pictures release Opens Friday at Ritz East recommended