(2007) "You really want to hear a war story?" asks Cpl Lawyer McCoy.

Employing a variety of visual viewpoints - a soldier's video camera, a French news team, a stationary surveillance camera, video from the insurgents, online video from family members, video of interrogations and interviews - writer/director Brian De Palma depicts in a docudrama the personalities of a squad of soldiers stationed at a checkpoint in Samarra, Iraq, during the summer of 2006, and the circumstances leading to the rape of a teenage girl.

(De Palma in referencing a similar rape and murders that took place in March 2006, involving five soldiers from a nearby checkpoint in Mahmoudiya, led by Pfc Steven D. Green, who raped and murdered a 14-year-old girl and killed another female relation, a five-year-old girl, and a man in the home before setting it ablaze, also reminds us of other atrocities committed in Iraq by American military personnel as well as by military-contracted security people such as those with Blackwater.)

With the intention of creating a video journal of his tour in Iraq, without regard to logical narrative or Hollywood pretensions, Pfc Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) shows his fellow soldiers on duty and in repose as an accurate, truthful documentation. The first casualty of war, however, is truth. College-educated Cpl Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney) reads John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra while the Pfc Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll) and Pfc B.B. Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman) prefer the porno of Hustler.

From a different point of view, a French news crew for ATV makes a record of the procedures vehicles must obey at the military checkpoint, where drivers are required to maneuver through an obstacle course posted with signs in both English and Arabic, instructing them what to do along with hand signals from soldiers; everyone is treated roughly with suspicion. Editorial commentary adds that half of all Iraqis are illiterate and that of the 2000 Iraqi civilians who have been killed at such checkpoints, only 60 were confirmed to have been insurgents.

When a car speeds past the trigger line, ignoring all efforts to halt, Flake lets loose, killing a pregnant woman whom her brother was rushing to the hospital. Salazar, "Sally," asks Flake how he felt about "lighting them up." It was "like gutting catfish," Flake replies, "stomping cockroaches." When asked if he didn't feel any remorse after finding out he'd killed a pregnant woman and her unborn infant, Rush interjects: "You can't afford any remorse."

Soon after the men, who had yet to see casualties of their own, receive word their tour has been extended, resulting in disgruntlement, followed by the death of Master Sergeant Sweet (Ty Jones), on his third tour, from an IED.

From the vantage point of an embedded ATV reporter on a night raid to a Sunni family's house outside the wire, we're shown how the soldiers break down the door and barge into the premises, taking documents in Arabic (evidence they say they'll find out later if it's evidence) and two males, leaving behind a wailing wife, two daughters, and an old man. Later Rush pats down a young school girl.

During a card game (all the cards have photos of females in dishabille), Flake, who's drunk and refers to himself as a wild card, proposes to the others another raid on the same house for the spoils of war, for the pleasure of raping a 15-year-old hajji, for revenge. Rush is all for it - "What happens in Vegas stays there" - while Sally with a hidden camera tags along as does McCoy, who's married, with the intention of limiting the despoiling. Later he confesses: "I just don't know how I'm going to live with it."

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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