Fallout of a brutal war

There's no narrative in war, just a brutal incomprehensibilty. Nick Broomfield's Battle for Haditha captures that madness, says David Hearst, who reported on the Chechen war Everyone who makes it back in one piece returns with a story. For many veterans of combat, it is an intensely private one.

They communicate naturally to their band of brothers, an exclusive group who share the same experience. But when they talk to family and friends outside this magic circle, their account is often halting, peppered with periphrasis and understatement.

They need to be prompted to go into details because they are still living through the trauma. Even veterans of other conflicts can't really understand.

Journalists return with stories for mass consumption. These are seamless, breathless, novelised accounts, in which the narrator miraculously finds him or herself in the thick of the action.

In reality, that is difficult to achieve. Eyewitness material is of necessity partial and incomplete, although the narrative is anything but. It soars above the landscape, at once omniscient and omnipresent, dropping in on scenes that could not possibly have been witnessed first-hand.

Sometimes the urge to play God is so great that journalists teleport themselves to datelines they were never at. Too often, the narrator becomes both judge and jury, a latter day Emile Zola, scribbling down that serial number of the bomb that has just dispatched a tractor load of Serb refugees, to be able to denounce the real villains, by writing a modern rendering of "J'Accuse".

One thing is for certain. No one today would have said this as a piece to camera: "There were bodies all over the place, and there was blood and everything. You were stepping over your - your American soldiers, and some of them were begging for help and crying for help. I seen them with their face half blowed off and some of them with their intestines hanging out, and they'd just look at you with a pitiful look because you couldn't do nothing for them.

"Another thing I seen there was, those battleships firing over our head and everything, they would make big craters in the ground, deep. I saw a cow, a French cow, blew right up in a tree. The tree was halfway just leaning over, and she was blew up in there."

Combat rifleman Jesse Beazley's description of Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, makes no attempt to inflate, or to judge. It goes no further geographically than the rifleman did. It aspires to no higher meaning than an account of what happened in and around him.

It's a sparse rendering from a generation of soldiers that kept silent for decades about the slaughter that took place that day on the Normandy beach. It is not necessarily a better world, but it is different from the one we inhabit.

Nick Broomfield's Battle for Haditha is based on an event that is still being considered by the courts of California.

In this sense, it is not so much as re-enactment of past events as a pre-enactment of actions that have yet to be established. It is important to realise that the battle for right and wrong is still raging.

On November 19, 2005, a roadside bomb exploded among a convoy of US marines in western Iraq, killing a lance corporal who was popular in his company. Enraged by this loss, the marines in the convoy shot dead a group of men in a white car caught near the blast.

Believing they were being fired on, the marines then stormed two houses, killing unarmed men, women and children. In all, 24 Iraqi civilians died.

The Iraqis called it a massacre and a US Congressman described it as cold-blooded murder.

Marine staff sergeant Frank Wuterich still faces nine counts of voluntary manslaughter. He is accused of killing nine people without properly obtaining positive identification that they were the enemy in the midst of an attack.

His actions amounted to unlawful killing in the heat of sudden passion caused by adequate provocation. The marine corps recently indicated it might drop the greater charge of murder, on the grounds that it would be hard to obtain in front of military juries. One other marine and two officers also face trial.

Today Sgt Wuterich has his own website. One of his lawyers, Mark Zaid, said: "Every marine, period, is trained with the intent to kill. What everyone will realise at the end of the day is that the characterisation of the events was nothing like reality, that the training the troops on the ground received was primarily responsible for what happened, and that the fog of war sometimes ends up with terrible results."

Broomfield's Battle for Haditha covers the same ground. All its characters - marines, insurgents, Al Qaeda fundamentalists and the families of in the two houses - tell their own story.

Unlike Black Hawk Down, every actor in this drama gets a voice and no one is spared, even the civilian victims who have a chance to avert disaster. The families in the two houses overlooking the road see the bomb being placed.

They rush to the imam, but he does nothing about it. Ironically, this part of the story no longer holds true. Since the surge of US troops, the insurgents of Haditha have turned against Al Qaeda and are being armed by the Americans.

Broomfield's movie simulates the digicam footage that might have been produced by an embedded journalist - from the shots that swing in a confined space of a barracks from one marine to another, to the sequences following the marines into the rooms they shoot up.

The camera functions as a doggedly individual witness to an unfolding tragedy. Like the company of marines it pursues, the camera is enveloped by the fog of war, not perched comfortably over it.

There is something post-9/11 about this. We live in an age where cameras are everywhere and where global violence is more likely to be captured by amateurs than by professionals.

The players in this video game also stay firmly behind their screens. Life or death for an Iraqi walking along a road with a spade (he has just planted an olive tree but is thought to have planted the bomb) is decided by a cursory conversation between the operator of a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) and his officer. All you hear is the American voice counting down the firing of the missile and the man disappears.

The digicam is not only the witness to the insurgency, but one of its weapons. As one insurgent triggers the roadside bomb, another films it. They get payment from the bomb-makers, and Al Qaeda gets the footage.

They also film the bodies shot by the marines, and the survivors of the rampage. The footage broadcast on television produces a new batch of recruits for the insurgency.

Battle for Haditha is out this month.