Gunners Palace A Soda Straw View of Hell by William Thomas
What’s this? you wonder, picking out a new rental DVD from the usual smorgasbord of simulated slaughter. Another Bruckenheimer - D.O.D. collaboration? A sequel to “Three Kings”? Not quite. The liner notes for “Gunner Palace” describe a documentary.
Later that night, at an hour when all children should be safely in bed and not crying in grief and terror over parents and siblings shredded by infidels who don’t speak their language or worship their God, the disc whispers into the machine like a 30-round clip seating home. You push “Play” half-expecting the thing to go off.
It does.
Whoa! From cameraman’s Mike Tucker’s opening footage taken through army windshields, and even worse, over the cabs of open trucks presumably as ill-armored as the perforated humvees around them, you realize that you are in for a ride that cannot end well.
While waiting to take a rocket-propelled grenade in the viewfinder, or a life-altering blast from artillery shells bundled into an Improvised Explosive Device, Tucker and his friends can at least tap their feet to the beat. Just as Jimi Hendrix and the Jefferson Airplane gave voice to insanity in the ‘Nam, rap has given voice to the grunt’s experience in I-rak—and to what this film does not or cannot show.
“A dirty ass guy from down South/I’m a nigger with a AK/Fuck with this/I’m the best you’ll ever see,” raps Pfc Elliott Lovitt.
But the Big Question this film never asks is: WTF are they doing in Baghdad anyway?
What business is it of theirs to travel halfway around the world to run their “bad ass” gangsta number on innocent families who do not want them there?
ADVENTURE TRAVEL
The palace taken over the gunners was the former playpen of one of Saddam’s sons. Except for the random fall of mortar rounds, it is perfectly secure.
They were seduced into the army, say these street savvy yet distressingly ignorant Americans by promises of paychecks, education, “travel and adventure”. Now the only choice open to 400 rapidly aging young members of the First Armored’s 2nd Battalion 3rd Field Artillery Regiment is “defending themselves” against Iraqi people defending themselves against Americans breaking into their homes and killing their families.
But “Gunner Palace” is not intended to be a polemic against yet another American invasion where mostly children die. Living with the gunners throughout September and October 2003, filmmaker Mike Tucker says his only desire was “to tell the soldiers’ story—to capture what we didn’t see on the news.”
In this, he nearly succeeded. Tucker’s filming of routine patrols is terrifying. And the stress on viewers and grunts alike gets worse with each foray.
“ Holy fuckin’ shit!” a GI shouts as the distant explosion of an RPG punctuates an Armed Forces Radio news bulletin insisting that “coalition forces are making steady, remarkable progress towards stability in Iraq.”
Another AFR “news minute” reports body armor coming “soon” as a grinning grunt demonstrates how, after another $86 billion failed to buy protection for their humvees, the GI’s are using scrap metal from a local dump to “up armor” their mounts. “It will probably slow down the shrapnel so that it stays in your body instead of going straight through,” this dude tells the camera.
His buddies crack up, some rolling on the ground in helpless hilarity. Some of them will soon be rolling on the ground dead. But only after filming ends.
WHEN DO BLOODS DRAW NO BLOOD?
Yeah but…how can a purported documentary filmed over two months in one of the hottest urban combat zones on the planet not show a drop of that stuff flowing so copiously under the doors of Baghdad ERs and through the streets of this city?
Not to mention bullet-riddled cars, mangled humvees, human beings turned into chunks of steaming meat, children sobbing over dead parents, maimed GIs screaming for their mamas?
Yet September 2003 was the month the Washington Post reported US battlefield casualties in Iraq “increasing dramatically” with “almost 10 American troops a day now being officially declared wounded in action.” That’s more than 600 GIs wounded and killed off camera.
With hospitals and morgues throughout the country reporting at least 10,000 Iraqi civilians gunned down since the “end” of the war, Faik Amin Baker, director of the city morgue, told journalists that the daily civilian corpse count had jumped from 10 to as many as 45 in one day. That’s 285 violent civilian deaths a week in Baghdad in September 2003. Yet not one dead or dying Iraqi person appears in “Gunner Palace”.
What’s wrong with this bloodless picture?
IN BED WITH SOLDIERS
Something else not mentioned in this movie is that all embedded journalists must sign a list of “conditions” limiting what they can show or describe.
“Did they tell the facts, but miss the truth?” asks Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Katherine Skiba of the more than 550 embedded journalists who accompanied invading US forces into Iraq. “Did the US Defense Department’s ground rules prevent them from showing the ugliness of war? Did their ‘soda straw’ view of the action mean they missed the big picture?”
James Fisher, an assistant Utah university professor who reported from several war zones, says the real problem is that embedded reporters “were looking through an American soda straw.” Fisher asks if Defense Department ground rules, which forbid showing dead US troops and civilians, skewed coverage.
“The idea of journalists allowing themselves to be taken under the wing of the United States military to me is very dangerous,” worries former CNN anchor Bernard Shaw. “I think journalists who agree to go with combat units effectively become hostages of the military.”
INFORMATION SUPERIORITY
“ Nine out of ten stories done by embedded reporters will be positive. The people at the Pentagon know this,” agrees Sig Christenson, a military reporter for The San Antonio Express-News.
Indeed they do. Army brass candidly admit that they embraced embedded reporters as a way to regain “information superiority” and get their story out to the American public, whose acquiescence is necessary for continuing US wars.
Tucker knew that if he broke the rules during the filming of “Gunner Palace”, he would be denied access.
Aly Colón says this “doesn’t mean journalists can’t try to get closer to their subjects so they can understand them better.” In fact, this editor recommends embedding journalists to get “the human story.”
But which human story? In “Gunner Palace” only the soldiers’ anguish and illegal presence have validity. Seen through the bullet-scarred windshield of a humvee, the “locals” are nearly invisible.
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
Despite the absence of “visuals” that would send urgently needed feedback on American war fantasies back home, “Gunner Palace” reveals the violence they’ve witnessed and perpetrated in the halting speech and haunted eyes of the young GIs being interviewed.
In the end, it’s the rhythm of rap blending with bursts of automatic weapons fire that drives this film beyond what war reporters call “bang bang” into the darkest corners of the American psyche—allowing some heavy truths to be told.
Listen to the brothers run it down, rapping right on the streets of Baghdad while their buddies beat time on the improvised scrap-metal armor of their humvees: “Got slugs that’ll fuck ya in your dreams and goals…false move and you’re dead, someone’ll push the fuckin’ brains out the back of ya head.”
ONLY ROBOTS JUST FOLLOW ORDERS
“ We do what the government tells us to do,” say several GIs. “Livin’ only for today is the motto we follow.”
But they are already gravely wounded in ways they can only rap: “Don’t feel much of nothin/Don’t fuckin’ care/We don’t give a fuck/We really don’t care/We really don’t care/ We represent for the nation/We don’t play games/When it comes time to do it don’t freeze blow their brains.”
MOSTLY RIGHT
“ You can’t lose sight of the safety of your fellow soldiers over…” another soldier stops himself after mentioning Iraqi civilians.
“ The president is mostly right,” lamely suggests another interviewee.
And the rest of the time? this film never asks. What then? You goin’ to keep followin’ orders you know are based on lies, committing any atrocity needed just to stay alive so you can enjoy your nightmares back home?
Even Mohammed Ali had no quarrel with no Viet Cong.
GO ARMY
In “Gunner Palace”, grimaces and anguished eyes speak deeper than the words that don’t come easily to soldiers groping for an outlet to some deeply troubling emotions. The real horror screaming repeatedly out of this movie is the sheer breathtaking ignorance of every soldier who is given voice in it. Who is the enemy? Why are so many Iraqis willing to die defending or avenging their clans? Could the grunts themselves be the enemy?
None of them gets it.
Not one. Even standing in the neighborhoods their presence reduced to rubble, they still don’t get lessons paid for in innocent blood.
One Tuesday morning, bombs explode at the Kadhimiya mosque. Many people die, and even more are wounded. But Tucker has to stay with his unit and doesn’t get any shots of that ghastly demolition, or the corpses frying in distant flames. It’s left to a baffled grunt to later describe how, when the Americans rushed in with weapons, armor and medical supplies, the locals greet them with outrage, “throwing rocks and sticks and bottles and chairs everything they can put their hands on.”
“I can’t believe Iraqis are after me/It’s got to be a tragedy,” Taylor raps.
Once again, the Americans are baffled and hurt. They just want to help. After irradiating and “rubblizing” neighborhoods, ripping off Iraq’s treasurers and treasury, wrecking the economy, trashing the country, killing more than one million people over the past dozen years and inciting suicide bombers to kill bunches more…GIs like Tom Susdorf simply cannot grok why Iraqis hate American soldiers.
As Specialist Richmond Shaw told New York Times reporter Monica Davey, “We’re basically stuck. Dirty, dusty, windy, blowing, miserable. We’re all trying to avoid getting shot, and we’re all wondering whether people will remember us and we’re trying to make difference before we die…For y’all, this is just a show. But we live in this movie.”
Yo, dudes! What about the millions of moms, dads, kids and grandparents around you who do not want to be in your movie? Who the hell is noticing what Iraqi families are going through?
Stuart Wilf notices. This GI heavy metal musician says he’s “just trying to stay alive.” But there is no way to rationalize someone’s child dying, he says in the last seconds of this flawed but riveting film. “I don’t think it’s worth the death of someone’s family member.”
SEE NO EVIL
Right on. But where are the accompanying visuals needed to drive home the biggest US news omissions this documentary was meant to correct? Instead of seeing mangled and grieving Iraqi families and American GIs, we are shown a touching scene of smiling American soldiers visiting an orphanage in Baghdad. It’s terrific to see these soldiers assuaging their guilt by playing with so many little girls.
But who killed their parents? Who made them orphans?
This film does not, dares not ask.
Stuart Wilf is trying hard to figure it out. He tells the camera he paid an Iraqi bookseller “thousands of fuckin’ dollars” for volumes to “make me smart”. What has this soldier learned so far? That the Vietnam currency is called the dong. But nothing about invading other countries. For Wilf and his battle buddies, Baghdad is just another ‘hood.
TRY TO UNDERSTAND
" Rap is the one place where you can get out your aggravation—your anger at the people who outrank you, your frustration at the Iraqi people who just didn't understand what we were doing,” Specialist Javorn Drummond later told Monica Davey.
But every Iraqi understands perfectly what the Americans are doing. It’s hard to miss when you’re carrying your dead four-year-old daughter in your arms.
Meanwhile, back in the Bradleys, tanks and humvees, listening to rap on mini-headphones may not the smartest move in a combat environment. But many young American soldiers credit 50 Cent, Pastor Troy and a Gulf war veteran named Mystikal with helping them man heavy machine guns against brooding residential streets.
Is rap’s powerfully pulsing encouragement of heavy violence a good thing for Iraqi families, or the soldiers breaking down their doors? Can this same sword slice the singers? Rapper Sgt. Jack Bryant Jr. died from a makeshift bomb. Pfc. Curtis Wooten’s dreams of becoming a hip-hop producer were similarly cancelled.
What a waste.
Now back in Germany, Sergeant “Solo” says, “My message in my rap is that I have a lot of anger about the war. “Why are we there? Why me? That’s basically what I want to say when I write: Why?”
Perhaps it’s time to start rapping some answers.
We also urgently need another documentary from a filmmaker as skilled and dedicated as Mike Tucker—this time after spending eight weeks embedded with Iraqi families.
That would be a show stopper.
What’s this? you wonder, picking out a new rental DVD from the usual smorgasbord of simulated slaughter. Another Bruckenheimer - D.O.D. collaboration? A sequel to “Three Kings”? Not quite. The liner notes for “Gunner Palace” describe a documentary.
Later that night, at an hour when all children should be safely in bed and not crying in grief and terror over parents and siblings shredded by infidels who don’t speak their language or worship their God, the disc whispers into the machine like a 30-round clip seating home. You push “Play” half-expecting the thing to go off.
It does.
Whoa! From cameraman’s Mike Tucker’s opening footage taken through army windshields, and even worse, over the cabs of open trucks presumably as ill-armored as the perforated humvees around them, you realize that you are in for a ride that cannot end well.
While waiting to take a rocket-propelled grenade in the viewfinder, or a life-altering blast from artillery shells bundled into an Improvised Explosive Device, Tucker and his friends can at least tap their feet to the beat. Just as Jimi Hendrix and the Jefferson Airplane gave voice to insanity in the ‘Nam, rap has given voice to the grunt’s experience in I-rak—and to what this film does not or cannot show.
“A dirty ass guy from down South/I’m a nigger with a AK/Fuck with this/I’m the best you’ll ever see,” raps Pfc Elliott Lovitt.
But the Big Question this film never asks is: WTF are they doing in Baghdad anyway?
What business is it of theirs to travel halfway around the world to run their “bad ass” gangsta number on innocent families who do not want them there?
ADVENTURE TRAVEL
The palace taken over the gunners was the former playpen of one of Saddam’s sons. Except for the random fall of mortar rounds, it is perfectly secure.
They were seduced into the army, say these street savvy yet distressingly ignorant Americans by promises of paychecks, education, “travel and adventure”. Now the only choice open to 400 rapidly aging young members of the First Armored’s 2nd Battalion 3rd Field Artillery Regiment is “defending themselves” against Iraqi people defending themselves against Americans breaking into their homes and killing their families.
But “Gunner Palace” is not intended to be a polemic against yet another American invasion where mostly children die. Living with the gunners throughout September and October 2003, filmmaker Mike Tucker says his only desire was “to tell the soldiers’ story—to capture what we didn’t see on the news.”
In this, he nearly succeeded. Tucker’s filming of routine patrols is terrifying. And the stress on viewers and grunts alike gets worse with each foray.
“ Holy fuckin’ shit!” a GI shouts as the distant explosion of an RPG punctuates an Armed Forces Radio news bulletin insisting that “coalition forces are making steady, remarkable progress towards stability in Iraq.”
Another AFR “news minute” reports body armor coming “soon” as a grinning grunt demonstrates how, after another $86 billion failed to buy protection for their humvees, the GI’s are using scrap metal from a local dump to “up armor” their mounts. “It will probably slow down the shrapnel so that it stays in your body instead of going straight through,” this dude tells the camera.
His buddies crack up, some rolling on the ground in helpless hilarity. Some of them will soon be rolling on the ground dead. But only after filming ends.
WHEN DO BLOODS DRAW NO BLOOD?
Yeah but…how can a purported documentary filmed over two months in one of the hottest urban combat zones on the planet not show a drop of that stuff flowing so copiously under the doors of Baghdad ERs and through the streets of this city?
Not to mention bullet-riddled cars, mangled humvees, human beings turned into chunks of steaming meat, children sobbing over dead parents, maimed GIs screaming for their mamas?
Yet September 2003 was the month the Washington Post reported US battlefield casualties in Iraq “increasing dramatically” with “almost 10 American troops a day now being officially declared wounded in action.” That’s more than 600 GIs wounded and killed off camera.
With hospitals and morgues throughout the country reporting at least 10,000 Iraqi civilians gunned down since the “end” of the war, Faik Amin Baker, director of the city morgue, told journalists that the daily civilian corpse count had jumped from 10 to as many as 45 in one day. That’s 285 violent civilian deaths a week in Baghdad in September 2003. Yet not one dead or dying Iraqi person appears in “Gunner Palace”.
What’s wrong with this bloodless picture?
IN BED WITH SOLDIERS
Something else not mentioned in this movie is that all embedded journalists must sign a list of “conditions” limiting what they can show or describe.
“Did they tell the facts, but miss the truth?” asks Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Katherine Skiba of the more than 550 embedded journalists who accompanied invading US forces into Iraq. “Did the US Defense Department’s ground rules prevent them from showing the ugliness of war? Did their ‘soda straw’ view of the action mean they missed the big picture?”
James Fisher, an assistant Utah university professor who reported from several war zones, says the real problem is that embedded reporters “were looking through an American soda straw.” Fisher asks if Defense Department ground rules, which forbid showing dead US troops and civilians, skewed coverage.
“The idea of journalists allowing themselves to be taken under the wing of the United States military to me is very dangerous,” worries former CNN anchor Bernard Shaw. “I think journalists who agree to go with combat units effectively become hostages of the military.”
INFORMATION SUPERIORITY
“ Nine out of ten stories done by embedded reporters will be positive. The people at the Pentagon know this,” agrees Sig Christenson, a military reporter for The San Antonio Express-News.
Indeed they do. Army brass candidly admit that they embraced embedded reporters as a way to regain “information superiority” and get their story out to the American public, whose acquiescence is necessary for continuing US wars.
Tucker knew that if he broke the rules during the filming of “Gunner Palace”, he would be denied access.
Aly Colón says this “doesn’t mean journalists can’t try to get closer to their subjects so they can understand them better.” In fact, this editor recommends embedding journalists to get “the human story.”
But which human story? In “Gunner Palace” only the soldiers’ anguish and illegal presence have validity. Seen through the bullet-scarred windshield of a humvee, the “locals” are nearly invisible.
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
Despite the absence of “visuals” that would send urgently needed feedback on American war fantasies back home, “Gunner Palace” reveals the violence they’ve witnessed and perpetrated in the halting speech and haunted eyes of the young GIs being interviewed.
In the end, it’s the rhythm of rap blending with bursts of automatic weapons fire that drives this film beyond what war reporters call “bang bang” into the darkest corners of the American psyche—allowing some heavy truths to be told.
Listen to the brothers run it down, rapping right on the streets of Baghdad while their buddies beat time on the improvised scrap-metal armor of their humvees: “Got slugs that’ll fuck ya in your dreams and goals…false move and you’re dead, someone’ll push the fuckin’ brains out the back of ya head.”
ONLY ROBOTS JUST FOLLOW ORDERS
“ We do what the government tells us to do,” say several GIs. “Livin’ only for today is the motto we follow.”
But they are already gravely wounded in ways they can only rap: “Don’t feel much of nothin/Don’t fuckin’ care/We don’t give a fuck/We really don’t care/We really don’t care/ We represent for the nation/We don’t play games/When it comes time to do it don’t freeze blow their brains.”
MOSTLY RIGHT
“ You can’t lose sight of the safety of your fellow soldiers over…” another soldier stops himself after mentioning Iraqi civilians.
“ The president is mostly right,” lamely suggests another interviewee.
And the rest of the time? this film never asks. What then? You goin’ to keep followin’ orders you know are based on lies, committing any atrocity needed just to stay alive so you can enjoy your nightmares back home?
Even Mohammed Ali had no quarrel with no Viet Cong.
GO ARMY
In “Gunner Palace”, grimaces and anguished eyes speak deeper than the words that don’t come easily to soldiers groping for an outlet to some deeply troubling emotions. The real horror screaming repeatedly out of this movie is the sheer breathtaking ignorance of every soldier who is given voice in it. Who is the enemy? Why are so many Iraqis willing to die defending or avenging their clans? Could the grunts themselves be the enemy?
None of them gets it.
Not one. Even standing in the neighborhoods their presence reduced to rubble, they still don’t get lessons paid for in innocent blood.
One Tuesday morning, bombs explode at the Kadhimiya mosque. Many people die, and even more are wounded. But Tucker has to stay with his unit and doesn’t get any shots of that ghastly demolition, or the corpses frying in distant flames. It’s left to a baffled grunt to later describe how, when the Americans rushed in with weapons, armor and medical supplies, the locals greet them with outrage, “throwing rocks and sticks and bottles and chairs everything they can put their hands on.”
“I can’t believe Iraqis are after me/It’s got to be a tragedy,” Taylor raps.
Once again, the Americans are baffled and hurt. They just want to help. After irradiating and “rubblizing” neighborhoods, ripping off Iraq’s treasurers and treasury, wrecking the economy, trashing the country, killing more than one million people over the past dozen years and inciting suicide bombers to kill bunches more…GIs like Tom Susdorf simply cannot grok why Iraqis hate American soldiers.
As Specialist Richmond Shaw told New York Times reporter Monica Davey, “We’re basically stuck. Dirty, dusty, windy, blowing, miserable. We’re all trying to avoid getting shot, and we’re all wondering whether people will remember us and we’re trying to make difference before we die…For y’all, this is just a show. But we live in this movie.”
Yo, dudes! What about the millions of moms, dads, kids and grandparents around you who do not want to be in your movie? Who the hell is noticing what Iraqi families are going through?
Stuart Wilf notices. This GI heavy metal musician says he’s “just trying to stay alive.” But there is no way to rationalize someone’s child dying, he says in the last seconds of this flawed but riveting film. “I don’t think it’s worth the death of someone’s family member.”
SEE NO EVIL
Right on. But where are the accompanying visuals needed to drive home the biggest US news omissions this documentary was meant to correct? Instead of seeing mangled and grieving Iraqi families and American GIs, we are shown a touching scene of smiling American soldiers visiting an orphanage in Baghdad. It’s terrific to see these soldiers assuaging their guilt by playing with so many little girls.
But who killed their parents? Who made them orphans?
This film does not, dares not ask.
Stuart Wilf is trying hard to figure it out. He tells the camera he paid an Iraqi bookseller “thousands of fuckin’ dollars” for volumes to “make me smart”. What has this soldier learned so far? That the Vietnam currency is called the dong. But nothing about invading other countries. For Wilf and his battle buddies, Baghdad is just another ‘hood.
TRY TO UNDERSTAND
" Rap is the one place where you can get out your aggravation—your anger at the people who outrank you, your frustration at the Iraqi people who just didn't understand what we were doing,” Specialist Javorn Drummond later told Monica Davey.
But every Iraqi understands perfectly what the Americans are doing. It’s hard to miss when you’re carrying your dead four-year-old daughter in your arms.
Meanwhile, back in the Bradleys, tanks and humvees, listening to rap on mini-headphones may not the smartest move in a combat environment. But many young American soldiers credit 50 Cent, Pastor Troy and a Gulf war veteran named Mystikal with helping them man heavy machine guns against brooding residential streets.
Is rap’s powerfully pulsing encouragement of heavy violence a good thing for Iraqi families, or the soldiers breaking down their doors? Can this same sword slice the singers? Rapper Sgt. Jack Bryant Jr. died from a makeshift bomb. Pfc. Curtis Wooten’s dreams of becoming a hip-hop producer were similarly cancelled.
What a waste.
Now back in Germany, Sergeant “Solo” says, “My message in my rap is that I have a lot of anger about the war. “Why are we there? Why me? That’s basically what I want to say when I write: Why?”
Perhaps it’s time to start rapping some answers.
We also urgently need another documentary from a filmmaker as skilled and dedicated as Mike Tucker—this time after spending eight weeks embedded with Iraqi families.
That would be a show stopper.