In May 2006, we asked the Army for permission to film inside their Iraq Simulation in California’s Mojave Desert. Formally known as the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, the simulation had been the subject of several news reports. These reports piqued our curiosity. We learned that the Army had – in order to adapt to the changing nature of the war in Iraq – constructed a number of mock villages in Mojave Desert and populated them with Iraqi American role players. Combat Brigades deploying to Iraq were sent through the simulation for two weeks and subjected to an immersive training exercise designed to prepare them for the military, cultural, political and humanitarian challenges awaiting them in the real war zone.
On one hand, this effort struck us as a perfectly sensible. On the other hand, there was something disturbingly odd about the exercise. Could war really be simulated? Who were these Iraqi American role players who lived for weeks inside the simulation? Aspects of the simulation seemed utterly fake. Yet the stakes were very real. Soldiers and civilians were dying in Iraq. Could this training save lives? This tension – between the fake and the real – is what drew us to the story as documentary filmmakers. It was our hope that by living inside the simulation we might answer these questions and gain valuable insight into the war itself.
Emboldened by the belief that the best films about war are often the least conventional (Altman’s Mash, Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, David O. Russell’sThree Kings, Peter Davis’s Heart and Minds), we approached the Army about access.
The Army resisted our initial efforts to film inside the simulation. As independent documentary filmmakers, we were not affiliated with any broadcast network or news agency. After persisting for several months and demonstrating our professional qualifications, we were invited to visit the simulation for two days.
On this initial trip we visited Medina Wasl, one of several Iraqi villages in the simulation, and observed an Army Combat Brigade involved in a role-playing exercise. This was fascinating and utterly surreal. It looked like Iraq (desert). It felt like Iraq (120 degrees). The townsfolk were all Arabic speaking Iraqis. Yet the village looked like a B movie set. Odder still were the American soldiers cast as insurgents lounging around town in dishdashah – a form of traditional Iraqi dress – BBQing hamburgers as if they were relaxing on the front porch of a fraternity house.
It was like walking into the middle of the world’s largest, most expensive, most complex stage play. And it was immediately apparent to us that the play itself – as enacted by soldiers and role players – could serve the film in two ways: as both the dramatic framework of our story; and as a distorted mirror reflecting -in strange but revealing ways – the many challenges facing America in Iraq.
After returning to New York and reviewing our footage, we immediately approached the Army and requested permission to live inside the simulation for the duration of an entire training rotation – three weeks. This was something no journalist, filmmaker or news organization had ever done before. We proposed that Tony Gerber (Director/Producer) would live with the Army Brigade in training, and that Jesse Moss (Director/Producer) would live in the village of Medina Wasl, a scenario that would allow us to document both sides of this “fake” war.
Much to our surprise, the Army agreed to our request. We asked to join the 4-1 Cav (the 4th Brigade of the 1st Cavalry, from Fort Bliss, Texas), during their training rotation in August 2006. On August 7, we moved into the simulation.
A written agreement with the Army ensured that we would have complete editorial freedom. Our movements were never monitored, our questions were never screened, and we were able to move freely within the simulated battle-space.
The major initial challenge was not the working conditions, which, although brutal, were not we reminded ourselves -nearly as dangerous as those faced by journalists in the real Iraq. (Soldiers and insurgents in the simulation play a sophisticated form of laser-tag. Although soldiers have died in the simulation, casualties are rare.)
Rather, the initial challenge to us, as documentary filmmakers, was finding characters to follow through the simulation. We hit the ground running. And within a few days identified the soldiers and Iraqi role players who would both play key roles in the “drama” and had compelling personal stories.
What made our challenge difficult was not only the number of characters we were actively following, and the improvised nature of the simulation, but the limited production resources available to us. Both of us worked alone in the field, shooting and recording sound. The work was exhausting and overwhelming but exhilarating. During the production we shot 350 hours of footage using the Panasonic DVX100a camera, shooting 24P anamorphic (16:9).
Full Battle Rattle is the story of a village, Medina Wasl, perched on the brink of civil war. The outcome of this story -the fate of Medina Wasl -was not scripted. Lt. Col. McLaughlin and his soldiers could achieve victory and win the “hearts and minds” of the people, or they could lose, and send the town spiraling downward. It became apparent to us, as we edited the film, that the story of Medina Wasl was a striking allegory of the real Iraq War, mirroring nearly every phase of the conflict, from occupation, through the rise of the insurgency, collateral damage, reconstruction and civil war.
In August 2006, the war was going badly, but some, including President Bush and his war cabinet, remained optimistic. Would the fate of Medina Wasl foretell the future? Or, more modestly, yield curious insight into the military missteps and the cultural and religious differences that confound America’s efforts in Iraq. We choose to let the viewer decide whether the outcome of the simulation (withdrawal) is an accurate indicator of the future.
Full Battle Rattle is also the story of a group of people brought together in an unusual moment in time, in an unusual place. The film, we hope, provides a snapshot of their lives as they undergo profound transformation. For the soldiers of the 5-82 Battalion, war and Iraq (and possibly death) loom on the horizon. For the Iraqi role players, Iraq, their native homeland, recedes into the past (and is destroyed), even as it materializes, in simulated form, in front of them. They are all on the journey to become Americans.
Unexpectedly, for Sgt. Paul Greene, who plays an insurgent in Medina Wasl, Iraq is both past, present and future, as he rudely discovers when, near the end of the film, he is deployed a third time.
Finally, Full Battle Rattle offers a glimpse inside the soul of the American war machine, presented in all its surreal, shocking power. There are 13 villages in the simulation, and new ones on the horizon. The Army employs 300 Iraqi American role players to populate these villages. Army Brigades (approximately 3000 soldiers) travel through the simulation nearly every month. And a military city of 15,000 – Fort Irwin – exists to support the operation of the simulation. What was once a cold war training facility, in which tanks battled each other in a simulated Eastern Front, has evolved into a web of villages in which an entire nation has been simulated, with rival tribes, an army of its own, two news networks, a civilian leadership, a court system, an insurgency, a radical Shiite militia, live goats, amputees, and robotic mannequins. The irony was not lost on us that while Iraq disintegrates, a new, ersatz Iraq rises in the desert, 40 miles from Barstow, California.
The fact that our film is not an expose makes some viewers uncomfortable. We are politically opposed to the war, but did not make this film with the intent of seeking confirmation for our own political beliefs. We sought to jump down the proverbial rabbit hole in order to better understand how we’ve become mired in Iraq and the consequences for all of us. What we present is – like the war itself – a complex reality; a portrait of real people under extraordinary circumstances. We prefer to think of this point of view as “humanist.” We do, however, believe that the final tragic outcome of the 5-82 Battalion’s mission in Medina Wasl (the utter destruction of the town) and the Battalion’s subsequent deployment to Iraq reveals a larger truth about the futility of this “forever” war.
It took approximately 14 months, and the work of 3 extremely talented editors, to edit Full Battle Rattle. We first assembled a rough outline of the key moment in the drama – what we referred to in the edit room as “on stage” events. These were the scripted scenarios -known as injects -devised by military and civilian planners (The Lizard Team) that follow a loose storyline and are designed to test the Brigade. In addition, these events included the Brigade’s un-scripted responses, and attacks initiated by insurgents. Our effort was to show the clear choices confronting Lt. Col McLaughlin, and document how the decisions he and his soldiers made would shape the final outcome of their mission.
Secondly, we focused on events “off-stage” – moments when our key subjects were out of character, and, in a sense, playing themselves. These included interviews, and cinema verite moments.
Lastly, we focused on the material that the audience would need to understand the rules of the simulation – the “rules of the game.” This information was largely provided – through interviews -with Col. Cameron Kramer, Chief of Plans and Operations, at the National Training Center, and Capt. Chris Mugavero, the Officer in Charge of Medina Wasl.
Finding the right balance between these three main elements required a long process of experimentation and calibration. The decision to leave the simulation in the final act of the film and return to Fort Bliss (with Lt. Col. McLauglin and his soldiers) and San Diego (with our Iraqi role players) was not easy. Yet ultimately we felt it was important, even necessary, to see our subjects in the “real” world, to understand everything that was at stake for them, and bring their stories, in the film, to closure.
The look and feel of the film was important to us. We come from a strong cinema verite tradition, but are comfortable and have worked successfully in narrative fiction and more conventional (interview-based) forms of documentary storytelling. The appeal of this film, in this place, was the opportunity to draw these styles together and create something new and different: to shoot breathless, surprising, and occasionally rough cinema verite; to cover the “on stage” moments in the simulation as, appropriately, a form of fiction; and sit down with our subjects for candid, intense interviews.
We came from different backgrounds as filmmakers but in Full Battle Rattle found the ultimate subject in which we could walk a line between the real and the imagined -a subject in which the distinction between the two is beside the point.
