Iraq war soldiers look inward

[thedrifter]

Article published September 28, 2006
Iraq war soldiers look inward

By CHRISTOPHER BORRELLI
BLADE STAFF WRITER

Early into Combat Diary: The Marines of Lima Company A&E, $24.95, a soldier says, "Until people started getting hurt, it was really exciting, almost fun, seriously like a video game." He says this months after returning from Iraq, frankly and with an ironic smile.

Another soldier, in The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends Universal, $14.98, remembers singing songs during basic training about bursting into Iraqi schoolyards and mowing down children. She says at first "I couldn't believe we were saying this stuff." But after a while, she says, she didn't think about it.

What's striking about these admissions, culled from a pair of extraordinary new documentaries about the daily reality of being assigned to Iraq, is not how chilling they are, or that the admissions are made by soldiers conditioned into remorseless killing machines, or that these are men and women who have since renounced the military in the service of a protest picture. Quite the contrary.

The subjects of Combat Diary, the Columbus-based Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, one of the hardest-hit units of the war, never question their purpose. Instead, they give intensely personal accounts of the mounting frustration and heartache they found trying to meet it.

And the subjects of Ground Truth, though they absolutely question their purpose and methods, go even deeper, stripping away the veneer of honorable service until all that's left, as one vet puts it, is "the psychological illness of war."

What both films share are men and women, lulled by promises of relatively easy service, who are unprepared for the full extent of what they've trained for, and in many cases, they feel set adrift once they've returned. What these movies also share is a wealth of video shot by the soldiers themselves.

If the Vietnam war was the first television war, as it's often called, then the war in Iraq is the first memoirist war. There are anti-war pictures, of course. But the finest documentaries made about Iraq, and these are two of them, transcend protest and remind us the most honest way to explain the emotional legacy of a war - raging 360 degrees, 24-7, with no clear fronts or enemies, as so many of the soldiers here point out - is to prod inward, to places that can't be amputated.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

DVD REVIEW: COMBAT DIARY - THE MARINES OF LIMA COMPANY
09.27.06
By Wade Gum

BUY IT AT AMAZON: CLICK HERE!
STUDIO: A&E Home Video
MSRP: $24.95
RATED: NR
RUNNING TIME: 91 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Extended footage
• Slide show with commentary

The Pitch

Marines document their tour of duty in Iraq with video cameras. It’s just like The Real World, except without all the sex and retards desperately trying to get famous.

The Humans

The Marines of Lima Company.

The Nutshell

Out of all the active companies in Iraq, no unit has endured more losses than Lima Company. Composed of reservists and the occasional member of the Iraqi army, the group never really expected to be on the frontlines of combat so often.

Simple missions designed to guard the Syrian border devolved into huge firefights with insurgents in nearby towns. Routine patrols along Iraqi roads turned into scenes of carnage when IEDs destroyed American tanks.

This documentary lets you see it all from the perspective of the men who lived through it. You’ll see the last days of several Marines whose lives were cut short and how their families are coping with the loss.

The Package

The documentary itself is presented in 16:9 widescreen format with Dolby Digital stereo sound. The meat of the special features comes in the extended footage and slideshow commentary.

The extended footage is simply much longer segments of the combat footage shot by the Marines of Lima Company that was chopped up and shortened in order to fit into the documentary. It can be difficult to tell exactly what’s going on at times without narration, but it gives you a sense of how hectic and confusing combat is when you’re thrown right into the thick of things.

The slideshow reunites three members of Lima Company as they sit in a recording studio and tell the stories behind many of the photographs they took while serving in Iraq. The three guys joke around a lot and their camaraderie makes the slideshow very enjoyable and a real step above the traditional DVD tactic of just slapping a few still photos on the disc and calling it a special feature.

The Lowdown

Combat Diary is a fairly straightforward documentary as far as things go. The film typically follows a pattern of introducing a Marine that died during duty, showing their background and how they related to their fellow soldiers, then showing video footage of the battle in which they died. This is followed by the reflections of the other members of Lima Company and the deceased soldier’s family.

The film is more of a tribute to the fallen soldiers than an actual account of Lima Company’s operations in Iraq. No narrators are heard besides actual men that served in the company and who wish to honor their fallen friends. The somber tone and setup of the film could probably be accused of being manipulative, but there’s really no other way to present the deaths of close friends other than in a tragic light.

The film does not spend any time preaching or raging against the war machine that sent these young men to their deaths. There’s no political bias or message that is driven into the audience’s heads. The filmmaker and the Marines involved could care less about the politics of war. The film is simply a tribute to fallen soldiers that died many miles from home and the families they left behind.

Ellie