The War Tapes hit Charlottesville.

The War Tapes is a damned ambitious project, as far as documentaries go. The producers handed out cameras to three soldiers -- two sergeants and a specialist -- from a company of New Hampshire Army National Guard infantrymen, then charged them with the duty of recording their tour for posterity. And that's just what they did. The War Tapes brings the day to day fight in Iraq to stateside Chairborne Rangers who want a taste of what war is really about: Shit, boredom, and then more shit.

The "deeply patriotic" Specialist Moriarty rejoins the Guard after a ten year break in service in order to deploy to Iraq. Moriarty, 34, describes his deep sense of loss after 9/11, followed by intense rage and a desire to get even. "I've been called an irresponsible father and and bad husband for going to Iraq," Moriarty confesses, but he feels compelled to take an active role in what he believed to be a war in the name of justice and justified retribution. Moriarty's wife confesses halfway through the film that her husband was a "stay at home dad" (read: unemployed) for about a year before rejoining the Guard. Chronic depression and anger management issues prevented Moriarty from finding employment after downsizing cost him his job as a forklift operator. Joining the Guard helps Moriarty climb out of his depression-- in the months before his deployment, his wife reports, he was calmer than ever, sure of himself and motivated by the idea that he was involved with something bigger than himself. A father of two -- including a young son -- Moriarty remarks upon departure, "Hopefully I'll be someone's hero."

Sergeant Pink and Sergeant Bazzi -- both in their mid-twenties -- possess an intimate understanding of the war's dark nuances and absurd ironies, an awareness lacked by the emotionally unstable Moriarty. The two sergeants are razor sharp: Pink holds a double-major bachelor's degree, Bazzi speaks Arabic. Both men are masters of grunt-style leadership learned nowhere but on the job. In moments of reflection, they are able to partially distance themselves from trauma and overbearing ideology -- what Bazzi derides as "groupthink" -- so that their journals reveal lucid thought attempting to grasp horrifying and surreal images of war. Bazzi's and Pink's contributions to The War Tapes prove Paul Fussell's claim hasn't ceded ground in the 21st century: "the dominant mode of war writing is irony."

From his diary, Pink recites, "Today was the first time I shook a man's hand that wasn't there." If we were to put a break in between "hand" and "that," we'd have a poem on our hands. Ironic poetic reflection characterizes Pink's footage and journal writing; holding the camera in front of his face, using the infrared mode that turns his face a sickly green, Pink tells us, "I had a recurring epiphany: this is happening, and will have a lasting impact for the rest of my life." Later, he describes an argument between soldiers about whether charred human flesh smells more like hamburger or roast beef. And it was a serious argument, Pink insists. Deadly serious. To concede defeat would be to discount the reliability of one's very senses. Smelling is believing.

Pink takes us on a tour of the FOBs "equipment graveyard," where burned-out hulks of M-1 Abrams tanks, Strykers, Humvees, Brads, Marine AMTRACs, and helicopters stretch as far as the eye can see. Each vehicle, Pink reflects, is some son or mother or father or brother or wife who will never see their family again. Looking at the funereal rows of matériel -- more like a mass grave than a junkyard, certainly as full of ghosts -- I can't help thinking about the total waste of it all, wasted life, wasted money, wasted resources, wasted privilege. Each Stryker vehicle costs upwards of 3 million USD. One row of totaled equipment bears an unfathomable pricetag. Uninsurable, totaled goods. And the bodies. Where are they? The DoD releases the names and unit information of service members killed in Iraq, but they keep a pretty tight lip on the wounded. Three of my buddies are in a burn unit in Texas right now recovering from shrapnel and burn wounds sustained when an EFP hit their convoy during an IED search in Baghdad. Their names aren't in any papers. I've looked. Perhaps that's for the best, I don't know. From what my buddies tell me, the American public probably couldn't handle the sight of the mangled, scarred soldiers and marines who populate the San Antonio burn campus, even if they are vibrant and eager to be reassembled into everyday life. As catastrophic as the damage is to U.S. bodies, equipment, and morale, the military keeps rolling.

So do the Kellogg, Brown, & Root convoys escorted by Pink, Bazzi, and Moriarty. Pink fumes as he scans a long line of beat-up, shot-up, defenseless trucks carrying goods to U.S. FOBs. He's worried about their drivers. Moriarty worries, "the priority of KBR making money outweighs our safety," but Pink extends his concern to the "TCN" drivers (Third Country Nationals), who are paid pennies and are more desirable targets than U.S. soldiers because of the logistical importance of their loads. "[TCN drivers] are not worth enough to have any protection," Pink says with no small measure of disgust. Early in the tour an administrative soldier told him not to waste medical equipment on injured TCNs or Iraqis. In his diary, Pink writes, "if he tried to stop me from administering aid . . . I would have slit his throat right there."

Pink supported Bush prior to deployment. The 2004 elections occurred during the soldiers' tour, and while Bazzi claims to be one of maybe 5 guys out of the whole company who didn't vote for Bush, Pink gives no indication that he's changed his stance. Still, he expresses anger at Bush's May 2003 showbiz declaration "major combat operations have ended."

Bazzi loves the Army, but hates the war. He says he joined the active duty Army after high school in order to travel. And travel he did, serving one tour in Bosnia and one in Kosovo. His mother begged him not to join the National Guard, but he did it anyway. Bazzi's mother and father brought Bazzi and the rest of the family to the United States to escape the 1980s resurgence of Civil War in Lebanon. He was 10 years old when the family fled, hence the Arabic proficiency. His parents split up shortly after arriving in the U.S. Bazzi's mother describes a terror scene before the escape when militia fighters fired at the house while Lebanese soldiers returned fire from a family window. Bazzi was a combat veteran well before joining the Army, it seems. We find out after the unit redeploys that he was not yet a U.S. citizen during the tour. The camera follows him to his induction ceremony. Sticking out like a sore thumb in his desert camouflage, among several hundred immigrants, Bazzi doesn't smile when a man on stage pronounces "everyone who has taken the oath" a U.S. citizen. The other new citizens cheer and hug one another. Bazzi just clenches his jaw, glances at the certificate, then walks out.

Perhaps thinking about U.S. intervention in the Lebanese Civil War[s], Bazzi says, "I think any country should be allowed to have its own civil war without anyone stepping in." Of course, if the "coalition of the willing" had not interfered in Iraq, there would be no overt civil war to speak of. But Bazzi's sentiment rings clear nonetheless. His attitude is live and let live, fuck with me and you better have back up. Bazzi is a jokester, so he takes abuse from his platoon mates without a grudge. At one point there is a conspiracy to kill Bazzi. "Today we kill Bazzi," an older sergeant says, "he's a spy." What do the Iraqis ask Bazzi more than anything else? "How did you get a visa to go to the United States?" Bazzi seems aware of his luck, and its happenstance nature, more than any of the other soldiers. "I don't really know," he tells the Iraqis, "my parents got it for me." Eventually Bazzi refuses to translate for the squad. Constantly bearing the bad news to Iraqis -- usually in the form of rigid SOPs -- wears him down. He describes an instance when a superior asked him to tell an Iraqi man that he couldn't cross the street to take his sick child to the hospital because "that side of the street" was off limits to Iraqis from the other side of the street on that particular day. Bazzi listened to the old man's agonizing pleas and finally refused his superior's demand. "I'm not telling him that," he said, then something like "if the general wants to come down here and tell these people why they can't cross the street then he can do it." "We're supposed to be helping these people," Bazzi mutters.

The film contains a good measure of soldier pranks, including an epic battle between a giant emperor scorpion and an equally massive camel spider. Godzilla v. Mothra may very well have been inspired by desert insect fighting circuits. I fought insects and geckos on multiple occasions, but I couldn't get them to take their contenders very seriously. Some of the pranks have a slightly darker undertone. Pink watches an old sergeant working away at a block of wood with a handsaw. "Whatcha doin'?" he asks. "Making a pistol." "Why?" "Because they won't give me one." Then he reads from his journal, something to the effect of, "Point an M-16 at an Iraqi and they won't move an inch. Wave a pistol and they'll take off running. It's what Saddam and his men used to carry." Bazzi gets the biggest laugh of the film while recording a convoy in support of a septic truck. As a deluge of "shit water" streams from the truck, flooding a roadside ditch, Bazzi says, "Whoever said bein' a soldier was all blood and glory forgot about the shit."

Back home, Bazzi ends the film with a sad reflection on the ideological vacuum of 21st century American war: it ends up little more than a way for a bunch of different people to get paid. "I got a paycheck from the war," Bazzi says, "KBR's makin' money . . . Humvee company's makin' money . . . you're makin' money [to the filmmaker]." Facts that don't bring SGT Bazzi, SPC Moriarty, or SGT Pink any satisfaction. Moriarty says, "they could pay me 500,000 and I wouldn't go back." Bazzi says, "every soldier wants to go to combat," like football players want to play football-- cheers as the Middle East-bound plane takes off from Ft. McGuire, NJ demonstrate this fact plainly enough. But, Bazzi adds later, the "bad thing about the Army is you can't pick your war."