This Year's F-9/11
Just found out this last weekend that the new documentary, Gunner Palace, will be released on March 4 (check out the trailer at Apple's Quicktime Trailers. Very excited. Frank Rich includes a bit more of a preview of the film, which follows a company of soldiers during the early months after the fall of Baghdad:

Watching "Gunner Palace" - the title refers to the 2-3 Field Artillery's headquarters, the gutted former Uday Hussein palace in Baghdad - you realize the American mission is probably doomed even as you admire the men and women who volunteered to execute it. Here, at last, are the promised scenes of our troops pursuing a humanitarian agenda. Delighted kids follow the soldiers like pied pipers; schools re-open; a fledgling local government council receives a genial and unobtrusive helping American hand. In one moving scene, Specialist James Moats tenderly cradles a tiny baby at an Iraqi orphanage while talking about the birth of his own first son back home: "I've seen pictures but I haven't got to hold him yet." He's not complaining, just explaining. He is living in the moment, offering his heart fully to the vulnerable infant in the crook of his arm.

These scenes are set against others in which the troops, many of them from small towns "that read like an atlas of forgotten America," have to make do with substandard support from their own government. "It'll probably slow down the shrapnel so that it stays in your body instead of going straight through," says one soldier as he tries to find humor in the frail scrap metal with which he must armor his vehicle. Eventually many of his peers, however proud to serve, are daunted by what they see around them: the futility of snuffing out a growing insurgency, the fecklessness of the Iraqi troops they earnestly try to train, the impracticality of bestowing democracy on a populace that often regards Americans either indifferently or as occupiers. When "The Ride of the Valkyries" is heard in "Gunner Palace," it does not signal a rip-roaring campaign as it did in "Apocalypse Now" but, fittingly for this war, a perilous but often fruitless door-to-door search for insurgents in an urban neighborhood.

It'll be interesting to see how wide a release this gets and what kind of discussion it provokes (i.e., Fox commentators denouncing it as scandalous and traitorous).

The NYTimes/Discovery channel has also been airing a very compelling multi-part series called Off to War, which follows a National Guard troop from rural Arkansas as they prepare for deployment in Iraq and what they find once they get there. (I've only seen the first episode, but have the next two Tivo'd.) The three parts will be shown again on 12 February.