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| The Lost Boys By Chris Ney Occupation
Dreamland OCCUPATION DREAMLAND is an hour-plus documentary produced by two independent filmmakers who were embedded with the 82nd Airborne in Fallujah before the siege of the city in Spring 2004. The film presents rare images of U.S. soldiers in their barracks, patrolling an urban combat zone, and reflecting on their lives fighting Iraq’s Sunni resistance. We meet Chris Corcione, who played in a heavy metal band before enlisting, and Eric Forbes, who left school after ninth grade and now wonders how he will complete his education while supporting his family. John Blyler enlisted because he worked at a shoe store next to an Army recruiting station and was convinced to sign up. He can’t believe that he’s in Iraq but believes that the Army is a good place for someone to start immediately after high school. We travel with these men as they work a job in a confusing and hostile environment —patrolling the city’s streets, engaging the people of Fallujah, and raiding the homes of those suspected as belonging to the resistance. At night, scenes are bathed in the green wash of nightvision as soldiers forcibly enter Iraqi homes looking for resistance fighters. Sometimes they find guns and ammunition, sometimes they make arrests, and sometimes evidence is inconclusive. In all cases, they find frightened women and children rousted from their beds by heavily armed, English-speaking men in desert fatigues. Soldiers are charged with doing “public relations” work in the community and struggle to communicate with the people of Fallujah across the language and cultural differences that separate them. Subtitled translations reveal that the people gathered around the soldiers are criticizing and complaining, praising or asking for help. One man reminds the soldiers that Iraqis’ grandparents learned how to fight the British and have passed that knowledge unto them. Others are angry that the troops detained a woman during a nighttime raid. When the soldiers don’t have access to the unit’s sole interpreter, most of these messages are lost. The film’s most revealing scenes take place in the unit’s living quarters and individual interviews. The soldiers’ opinions are diverse and conversations are wideranging —touching on everything from Sonny and Cher (“If she gets one more fucking facelift her eyebrows are going to be on top of her head” and “Sonny was our last hope to get a hippy in office”) to George W. Bush’s foreign policy (“Plain, flat-out, war is money and I guess every time we get a fucking Republican we have that to look forward to,” says one, while another says, “I have a pretty strong faith that the government didn’t send me over here to protect oil.”) Another powerful scene—particularly from a counter-recruitment perspective— involves the unit’s meeting with a recruiter seeking the soldiers’ reenlistment. In private interviews, soldiers discuss how they are badgered when they say they don’t want to re-enlist. Sensing their resistance, a recruiter in the meeting threatens, “You go out there in the real world and spend all your money on beer and somebody’s going to be evicting you so you’re going to be sitting on a street corner and you’ll call up and say, ‘Can I get back in the army?’” The soldiers remain unconvinced, arguing that there is no shame to spend six months 14 THE NONVIOLENT ACTIVIST/NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2005 an Iraqi-American attorney, are living at home until they get back on their feet back. Occupation Dreamland falls short in many ways. There is a sense that this film is supposed to offer a convincing antiwar statement, but it does not. The soldiers’ views are varied and diffuse, and few scenes would convince supporters of the war to change their minds. It is surely tame compared to more widely distributed and overtly shocking films like Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911. Nevertheless, the filmmakers do succeed in sharing some of the humanity of the soldiers in Iraq. They are young men in a place that they never imagined, carrying out a mission they do not fully understand, amid a people with whom they cannot communicate. We don’t see enough of them to develop deep sympathies with them, and clips from their civilian life before Iraq are more confusing than illuminating. Nonetheless, you have the sense that these are good people, the kind you might meet in the local pub or gym. Early in the film, one of the soldiers says, “I want some answers, some clarification of what we’re doing.” It’s a question that many people have about the Iraq war right now and hearing a soldier’s perspective on it is a rarity that makes this documentary worthwhile. Chris Ney served as WRL’s Disarmament Coordinator and Fundraiser and currently lives in the Boston area. |
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