Over There

The War Tapes brings the Iraq war home.

by Sam Adams

Deborah Scranton got to know a lot of soldiers while making a film on World War II veterans from her hometown of Goshen, N.H. But she'd never seen the current conflict in Iraq covered in a way that brought home what it was like to be there. "We are a country at war," she says. "I think it's important that we know what war looks like." So when the New Hampshire National Guard asked if she'd like to embed with a unit about to ship off to the Middle East, Scranton had a different idea. She recalls, "I literally woke up in the middle of the night with this idea that if we gave soldiers the cameras, we could tell the story through their eyes."

TALES FROM THE FRONT: Sgt. Steve Pink, one of the War Tapes' subjects and cameramen, in his humvee in iraq.

Scranton, a former member of the U.S. ski team with years of experience covering sports for TV, was used to handling multicamera shoots, and she knew just what she needed: an infantry unit stationed at a base with Internet access, so she could be in contact with the soldiers. The New Hampshire NG had one such unit, but they had already shipped out to Fort Dix, and were days away from deploying to Iraq. So inside of two weeks, Scranton was explaining her idea to 180 soldiers, and weathered the barrage of questions that followed: Are you for the war? Against it? Why should we trust you?

Sgt. Steve Pink, who became one of The War Tapes' three main subjects, admits he was dubious. "I believe that the media holds this license to tell whatever they want, so I was very skeptical," says Pink, who worked briefly for a newspaper before being called up. "But I did like this idea of getting a new camera, and being able to document what I was doing, and hope for the best that it would come out the same in the end."

Scranton promised the soldiers she would "tell the story through their eyes, whatever it looks like, whatever it takes" — a vow she repeats several times during our conversation. Via e-mail or IM, Scranton kept in contact with her three main subjects — Pink, Sgt. Zack Bazzi and Specialist Michael Moriarty — advising them on the finer points of cinematography each time a box of tapes arrived at her door. (All footage was screened by the military, but Scranton says only one tape was confiscated, on which Pink made off-color comments while filming the corpses of Iraqi insurgents. The tape's contents are discussed in the film.) Though Scranton says she occasionally made suggestions, Pink is adamant that she never told him what to film. "I would've declined working with the project," he says. "The instructions were pretty much like, 'When you interview someone, try and get a microphone on them. Try to frame them in profile.'"

The War Tapes is one-sided by definition; the Sunni insurgency in Fallujah broke out not long after Charlie Company arrived, so the soldiers were forbidden from all but cursory contact with Iraqi civilians. But the movie offers an unequalled portrait of life on the front lines — and, as Scranton points out, in the "360-degree battlefield" of Iraq, "when you lock and load and leave the wire, you are the front line." There's not much in the way of combat footage — Pink allows that, on missions, looking after the camera was "at the very bottom of my list of things to do" — but the film brings home with visceral immediacy the constant threat under which the soldiers live. Camp Anaconda, where the guardsmen are stationed, is nicknamed "Mortaritaville" for the constant shelling attacks, and the last thing troops see as they leave the base is a sign reading, "Is today the day?"

In addition to vérité footage and interviews, the soldiers' experience is fleshed out by excerpts from Pink's journal, which range from thoughts of his girlfriend at home, to vivid descriptions of combat, to the admission, "I want to kill." On-screen, Pink is taciturn; even after he returns to the States, he declines to discuss his experiences in detail. But the movie, he says, has laid the groundwork for him to open up to people at home. "Now, I can talk about this," he says. "Now my family has an idea of what I went through, and I have an idea what my family went through. That's at the heart of this film. Just being able to show those with an unfiltered view."