SGT Steve Pink filming in front of a Humvee (SenArt Films / Scranton/Lacy Films)

Before their deployment to Iraq in late 2004, a few National Guardsmen were given digital video cameras by a small film studio. Their collected footage is The War Tapes, a documentary that won at the Tribeca Film Festival and that is currently showing in New York City, with a set of premieres around the country today. Recording their experience of war by handheld DV camera, from a base tent or from the seat of a Humvee, these soldiers are another example of the extending narrative of war, from print letters, to blogs, to footage shot by the soldiers.

Watch the full trailer here. Film clips are avaiable on the official website, but I’ve chosen to link to one clip—Hot Side of Beef—which depicts soldiers burning a dead cow on a the side of the road, a precaution against a possible roadside bomb.

P.S.
Richard Prouty on One-Way Street rightly contrasts the War Tapes cow-burning clip with Ginga Singh’s 1916 letter from Iraq: being forced to eat horses and mules during the Ottoman army’s five-month siege of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force at Kut-al-Amara, south of Baghdad. That siege ended in the surrender and harsh captivity of thousands of British-Indian soldiers. Here’s the letter, as posted last week.

Gunga Singh (Sikh) to Dafadar Jaswant Singh (attached to 6th Cavalry, France)

16th Cavalry Depot
Lucknow
21st April 1916

The 7th Brigade is surrounded in Mesopotamia. Attempts have been made to rescue them, but without success. There was a fight on 6th March and heavy losses to us in he attempt to relieve them. Some men of ours are in the besieged force, twenty in number. They have eaten their horses and mules. They have a quarter of a pound of flour each per diem. We are hopeful of being sent to join the relieving force. [Letter passed]

David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War, 178.