FILM

14 Pews presents Full Battle Rattle, film about life inside the US Army's Iraq simulation in California's Mojave Desert.

Full Battle Rattle, a documentary by Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss, gives a remarkably thorough and detailed account of the difficult conditions facing American soldiers in Iraq. The filmmakers follow an Army battalion under the command of Lt. Col. Robert McLaughlin as it tries to bring a semblance of order and stability to a fractious Iraqi town menaced by violence. The soldiers must adjudicate disputes between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, prop up the local authorities and fight off insurgents, who are hidden in plain sight in the middle of town and carry out roadside bomb and rocket attacks at the worst possible moments.

Since there have already been quite a few ground-level Iraq documentaries, all of this might sound like a familiar scenario. Except that in the case of “Full Battle Rattle,” a scenario is literally what is involved. The Iraqi village of Medina Wasl is, in effect, a movie set, part of a training site built and operated by the Army in the Mojave Desert. Colonel McLaughlin’s earnest campaign to win hearts and minds and fight a successful — or at least nondisastrous — counterinsurgency is an exercise, a preparation for the real dangers he and his soldiers will face when they deploy to the actual Iraq.

Medina Wasl is populated by actual Iraqis: refugees from that country who role-play various officials and civilians. The insurgents are American soldiers, some of whom clearly relish a chance to be the bad guys. In the course of three weeks the battalion moves through several stages of engagement, identified in chapter titles (“Reconstruction,” “Insurgency” and so on) that suggest a microcosm of the larger war. The soldiers travel between their temporary base and the town, spending time at checkpoints and in long meetings with the mayor, the deputy mayor and the chief of police.