”I’m going to Baghdad next week. Do you want to come?”

Documentary filmmaker Michael Tucker got the call from a friend while he was in New York working on a video project. The friend, a German armored vehicle salesman, invited Tucker to grab his camera and ride into Iraq on a business trip.

”I mean, who would say no?” says Tucker. “I’d been waiting all my life to go do something like that.”

A Post-War Production

It was the first week of May, 2003, not long after George Bush declared the end of major combat. At the time, Tucker didn’t know what he was getting into. But it would be the first of four life-changing trips he’d make in the next ten months to document U.S. soldiers in what everyone thought was a post-war peacekeeping mission.

”The war wasn’t over — it was basically just starting,” says Tucker. “Unless you were a soldier or an Iraqi or someone standing in the middle of it, no one knew that.”

“This is not about the politics. This is about the war from the inside out, told by the people caught in the middle.”

Soldiers’ Story

Tucker’s riveting documentary, “Gunner Palace,” opens in U.S. theaters on March 4 following a critically acclaimed debut at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals. It features the day-to-day experiences of the 2-3 Field Artillery Battalion (also known as the Gunners), who were stationed in one of the most outrageous places in Baghdad — Uday Hussein’s former palace in Adhamiya.

”I heard they were in this fantastic location,” says Tucker. “It had been bombed during the first part of the war, during ‘Shock and Awe.’ I knew that it had a pool. It was so unbearably hot down there. In the hotels in Baghdad you couldn’t work because there wasn’t any electricity, and at night you couldn’t sleep. So it just sounded great to have the opportunity to follow these guys around in operations, but also to have a nice place to retreat to.”

Tucker watched and filmed as the environment grew more complex by the day. “We’d seen some of it on the news, but nobody had really spent time with these guys,” he says. “I wanted to see everything — what they were doing in these communities, how they were interacting with the Iraqis, what’s happening during the day and what’s happening at night. And that’s the thing that’s so hard to communicate and why this film’s so special. It’s not just about the really violent things; it’s also the other times — how people are coping with things, their sense of humor.”

The Real and the Surreal

In the heat of it all, he says, soldiers kept in touch with friends and family using modern technology — unprecedented in wartime, but often making the separation feel even greater. In a diary entry from September, 2003, Tucker wrote, “Nothing is more bizarre than watching a soldier argue with his wife about which bills to pay as a firefight plays in the distance. The irony is, all the technology in the world can’t bring them home. You feel close, but in reality, you are further away than you thought.”

It was this constant juxtaposition of real and surreal, along with the soldiers’ attempt to cope and survive in the face of growing hostility, that made Tucker realize he had to tell their story to the world. “For the soldiers, it’s really validating that someone tried to capture what they’re going through,” says Tucker. “That’s probably what I’m most proud of — that to them it feels true.”

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