‘Once Upon a Time in Iraq’ — White Man’s Burden meets Apocalypse Now

BBC2’s much heralded five-part documentary series on the war in Iraq and its aftermath — Once Upon a Time in Iraq — is both compelling and disappointing in equal part. Directed by James Bluemel and narrated by Andy Serkis (of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit fame), though its intentions may have been noble — and though much of it is sufficiently gripping — by the end the series leaves you cold in its reduction of the war and its horrors to something approximating to an individual trial of endurance and overcoming on the part of its participants, turning the series into an unfortunate and unsatisfactory cocktail of expiation and entertainment.

This is most powerfully expressed in the sections and interviews covering the experiences of the war’s western participants — specifically a former Recon Marine, a US Army Lieutenant Colonel, a New York Times journalist and an Australian freelance photographer. They look back on what they did and witnessed with the studied cigarette-smoking and tequila-swigging gravitas of men stamped not so much with the horrors of war but with its Hollywood-crafted simulacrum.

Lieutenant Colonel Nate Sassaman, who commanded an army battalion of 1000 men between 2003 and 2004, comes over as a cross between GI Joe and Kurtz from Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. His descent into madness…