In a war rife with college-aged American casualties, the ivory tower provides thick insulation against the realities of our peers who are living on the front line. Gunner Palace, Michael Tucker’s new documentary about the war in Iraq, is a potent reminder that most of the soldiers on the front lines could be behind us in line to tap a keg—if only they weren’t in uniform.

The product of 60 days spent with soldiers of the 2/3 Field Artillery, a.k.a. “The Gunners,” the film consists of everything from interviews to impromptu freestyle sessions, punctuated by mortar fire and MTV-style editing. The movie doesn’t quite shock and doesn’t quite awe. But it does achieve a subtler success: it captures the difference between the disjointed world of war and the smooth, clearly-labeled sound bytes of the coverage on the nightly news.

This is the very crux of the movie’s success: it demonstrates the incoherence and illogic of war from a soldier’s perspective. The Gunners themselves are familiar to us. Their early awkwardness in front of the camera is reminiscent of an eighteen-year-old asking for a first date. They live in the bombed-out pleasure palace of Uday Hussein, and if not for the uzis and the uniforms, some of the scenes almost evoke Animal House—pool parties, death metal T-shirts, rat chases around the cluttered floor of what looks like a dorm room.

But the movie faces something of a paradox: how does one use footage of reality to communicate the surreal situation of war? Documentary footage rarely affords the evocative ambience and haunting images of fictional war films. Palace is neither structurally nor visually slick, partly because the footage was kept mostly chronological, and it was captured with a hand-held camera. Although this contributes to the sense of authenticity within the film, there are times when the conspicuous sound editing and self-conscious narration take the viewer out of the narrative.

Despite the somewhat distracting nature of the raw footage, it emphasizes a central theme of the film: the uncertainty inherent in trying to keep peace in a combat zone. Every plastic bag on the street might be an IED (Improvised Explosive Device), every raid another anonymous order, every prisoner facing an unknown fate. There is no clear “mission” underway, no dramatic and well-coordinated “operation” in evidence.

Through selective news broadcasts, the American public is shown only a sleek, “lean machine” image of a war that is organized into victories and losses. In contrast, the Gunners live in a world of anticipation and insecurity, and it is this disjunction Palace aims to explore. Against inserted radio clips of Donald Rumsfeld’s pronouncements of progress in Iraq, the sequences of the soldiers’ assignments reveal that their duties and equipment remain unchanged. Days are spent patrolling the streets of Baghdad in scrap-metal-sided Humvees (armor deftly satirized by one soldier as guaranteed to “slow the shrapnel down so that it stays in your body instead of going clean through it”).

This is the challenge of creating a war documentary—making sense of an incoherent situation without betraying the subject. What life is like for the soldiers cannot be fully communicated, but it can be appreciated. Palace avoids the easy spoon-feed of any particular moral or political statement; instead it finds its message in the words of the soldiers themselves.

But even as these young soldiers take the opportunity to tell their story to the camera, they are skeptical about its impact on audiences: “After this you’re going to get your popcorn out of the microwave, and maybe talk about what I said,” one said in the film.

The audience member who wants to walk away with an insider’s understanding of what it’s like to live in a war zone is sure to be disappointed. But that’s because the soldiers themselves don’t understand it. You will not leave Palace with the cathartic sense of satisfaction of a fictional war film. But you also will not leave without its message.

-—Staff writer Susan E. McGregor can be reached at mcgreg@fas.harvard.edu.