The palace is completely in ruins. Rubble and debris surround the stairs and piles of twisted wires, splintered wood, and shattered glass lie scattered in every room.
This bombed-out Iraqi palace, once the venue for lavish weekend parties hosted by Saddam's son Uday Hussein, is the setting for filmmaker Michael Tucker's documentary, "Gunner Palace."
Most American citizens have a strong opinion about the war in Iraq. So does Army Field Artillery Division 2/3, a core of embedded soldiers dubbed "The Gunners" that Tucker spent a year filming.
Tucker avoided the Michael Moore approach by remaining quiet and turning the camera on the soldiers, not on himself. He followed their daily routines and the issues they faced, sidestepping politics and unnecessary outside commentary.
Though major combat had ended by the time Tucker began filming, there were still many concerns about security and reconstruction. The soldiers devoted most of their time to patrolling an area that was not actively volatile, but guarded out of fear.
The grounds at Gunner Palace were still in remarkably good shape, as the soldiers noted while they enjoyed the huge swimming pool, stocked fishing pond and putting green. As one soldier lamented in the film, they became policemen and social workers. Gone was the illusion that they were defending America from terrorists.
They were simply defending Iraq from itself.
Based on minimal intelligence, the soldiers would head out in the middle of the night to search houses and arrest suspects. Given the faulty intelligence that prompted the war, it was disturbing to see how much trust the soldiers put in the information they were given.
The soldiers' attitudes toward the Iraqi citizens varied widely. Soldiers and Iraqis working together as interpreters and intelligence agents greatly respected one another.
Other soldiers reveled in "scaring the natives."
In such situations, the look in the Iraqis' eyes went straight into the camera - it was a look of hatred and absolute disgust for the soldiers who invaded their country and treated their people in this manner.
Despite all the rocks thrown, the lack of properly armored vehicles, and fear of insurgent attacks, the soldiers kept up their good humor. Nearly all of the soldiers were young, just out of high school and from small American suburbs.
They had joined the army for a job, not for a noble purpose.
During a visit to an orphanage, a soldier held a deformed, abandoned Iraqi baby. Staring at it, he began telling how his wife had given birth to their first child just a few months before. Holding someone else's unwanted baby in his arms, he said that he was looking forward to going home so that he could hold his own child for the first time.
When Tucker asked one of the soldiers if his family and friends in America could empathize with what he had been through, the man replied that they would never truly understand the horrors that soldiers across Iraq have experienced. Only those who have been there could truly understand.
Walking out of the theater, one doesn't have to worry about being pelted with stones, spit at by children, or scared that a paper bag on the street might be an Improvised Explosive Device. The average person does not even have a taste of the real experiences of a corps of American combatants embedded in Iraq. But after seeing Tucker's documentary, they'll at least have walked a few miles in their combat boots.
