Full Battle Rattle

Review

Watching the coolly ironic documentary Full Battle Rattle, one’s heart goes out to Lieutenant Colonel Robert McLaughlin as he sits in a daze in front of his desert headquarters, having seen most of his battalion slaughtered the night before by Iraqi insurgents. �Am I a failure?� he asks, then answers, �Actions speak louder than words.� The poor man: He did his diligent best to bring order to the tiny village of Medina Wasl. His men murdered only a few innocent civilians, and he more or less averted civil war between Sunnis and Shiites after the assassination of the deputy mayor’s son (on video, to shouts of �Allahu Akbar!�). The worst part is that there he was on camera when the massacre of his men went down, celebrating the return of authority to the Iraqi mayor. (�Jobs are coming back to the community!�) Now he has to eulogize the dead. Then he has to pack up and head to Iraq and do it for real�and hope to God that life doesn’t replicate art.

Full Battle Rattle is an indelible vision of modern war, a not-so-fun fun-house mirror of the Iraq occupation set in California’s Mojave Desert. The place, 1,200 miles square, is called the National Training Center�a billion-dollar �virtual Iraq� at Fort Irwin with an acting troupe of hundreds (many of them Iraqi immigrants), in which military personnel get a mini-jolt of what they’re in for. The film is freaky, amusing, and sickening in equal measures�part fly-on-the-wall vérité, part multiple-perspective Altmanesque tragicomedy. Soldiers writhe on the ground choking in their blood, and then Americans and Iraqis pick themselves up and stand in line at ice-cream trucks; it’s like Disney World with the fireworks aimed lower.

Directors Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss don’t lead with their politics, whatever they might be. And on one level, the mere existence of the center is reassuring: Conventional antiwar wisdom holds that the Cheney-Rumsfeld armchair warmongers had little regard for the welfare of young, inexperienced soldiers with no knowledge of Iraqi culture. That might have been true at the outset of the occupation, but now our tax dollars are at work creating a kind of alternate reality show in which �simulation architects� concoct intricate scenarios (miscommunications, suicide bombings) and devise meaty roles for Iraqis who worry they’re somehow betraying the folks back home. But they need the money�often to send to the folks back home.

The less reassuring part is that the situation�even fictionalized, softened, without the crucial components of lawless private contractors and reconstruction stalled by incompetence and fraud�is borderline hopeless. Full Battle Rattle begins as a showbiz comedy, with an almost stoned view of the occupation, but gradually the bottom crumbles and drops out. The plastic dummies of dead soldiers have wounds modeled on actual casualties�they’re horrifying. The reenactments, meanwhile, take on a mystical quality: The masks become real. The Iraqi actors�who know that the political (and physical) infrastructure of their country has collapsed, who still have families in peril�look askance (no matter what their script says) when McLaughlin tells them that the U.S. will guarantee their security. A soldier admits there are moments when he despises the Iraqis, even though he knows they’re actors. An illegal Iraqi immigrant, Nagi, who plays a policeman, works like mad to ingratiate himself with the officers: Maybe if he helps the Americans he will not be sent back, where he will probably be killed for collaborating. It’s a little like what happens to real Iraqi policemen�except most of them die.

The only subjects in Full Battle Rattle having a whale of a time are the Americans who play Iraqi insurgents. Gerber and Moss track their planning sessions; the men all but rub their hands with glee at the prospect of causing chaos instead of trying to prevent it. They get to pick off the enemy the way soldiers do in movies, the way Americans can’t in a war they should never have been fighting�here a catastrophic farce, a let’s-pretend that ends with a mass deployment to hell. — David Edelstein

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• David Edelstein's Full Review (7/14/08)