Nearly 20 years after their deployment to Iraq, veterans try to make sense of the war.
In 2003, President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq, in his now-infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech. A few months later, Michael Tucker, an American filmmaker, embedded with an Army battalion that had just arrived in Baghdad to help restore order. |
What these men didn't know was that the war was just beginning. They quickly found themselves fighting a rising insurgency and were called upon to face a menace they were unprepared for and ill equipped to defeat. Tucker's documentation of the unit's struggle resulted in "Gunner Palace," the war documentary that he described as "South Park on the Tigris River." |
Fast forward to 2020, when plagued by pandemic boredom, Tucker and his life and directing partner, Petra Epperlein, wondered what had become of these young soldiers. The couple embarked on a two-month, 12,000-mile road trip to reconnect with former battalion members, hanging out with them in their new lives: at a motorcycle rally, in a guitar repair shop, on a front porch. |
To mark this week's 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, our Op-Docs series premieres "The Army We Had," Tucker and Epperlein's stunning sequel to "Gunner Palace." It's a heartbreaking perspective on a tragic and useless war and how it continues to torment its veterans. Watching the film, I was struck by how open and honest these men were about their time in Iraq. |
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The prevailing question for the young men in the first film was, "Why am I here?" This sequel finds them two decades later wondering, "What was it all for?" And none of them can point to any positive takeaways. |
Our Op-Docs team worked closely with the directors in shaping the film and in conveying the enduring emotional, financial and physical costs of the war. |
Soon after the invasion of Iraq, surveys found that more than 70 percent of Americans supported the war. But today, the war is widely viewed as a disaster of foreign policy. The fight has ended, but the American veterans of the conflict continue to be tormented by the battle. |
"They are the ones that carry the moral injury," Tucker told me this week from Ukraine, where he's filming a new project. "It's real anger. What moral injury does Bush carry? Does this weigh on him every day? It was horrible, and he does not have to bear the consequences of it." |
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