A Tough One...

TELEVISION REVIEW
Grunts' view of war riveting
BY GLENN GARVIN ggarvin@herald.com
• Over There,
10-11 pm Wednesdays, FX

Bullets chopping holes in the sand dunes around him, forbidden by his idiotically public-relations-minded officers to shoot back, advance or retreat, the sergeant is wide-eyed and nearly speechless at the question from the young recruit crouched next to him: What's our objective? Roars the sergeant in helpless rage: ``We should try to stay alive for the next 15 minutes!''
That's the way you see the war in Iraq in Over There: from a desert foxhole. This searing new drama has nothing to do with the immaculate battle lines drawn on a Pentagon map or the colored bars across a State Department psy/ops chart. It's a grunt's-eye-view, blurred with terror and exhaustion, smeared with sand, sweat and blood. If you can stand to watch it at all -- and for some people that may prove nearly impossible -- you won't be able to tear your eyes away.
No television show, and perhaps no film either, has ever documented the minute-to-minute lives of combat soldiers the way Over There does. From battlefield toilet etiquette (''You want privacy, go where we can't see you; you wanna stay alive, go where we can'') to the exquisitely torturous moral decisions made in a split second as a car (full of civilians? or suicide bombers?) speeds toward a roadblock, it colors in the intimate details of a GI's life the way Ernie Pyle might have done if he'd been equipped with a video camera.
Over There follows the lives of seven recruits (two of them women) newly arrived in Iraq and their veteran sergeant, known as Sgt. Scream for reasons that are instantly obvious. Though the show's focus is determinedly narrow -- Over There is about the troops, not the geopolitics of Baghdad or Washington -- its canvas is broad; the story stretches not only to their families back home, but to a military hospital in Germany where one soldier will soon be in rehabilitation after his leg is blown off by a booby trap.
Like countless war movies extending back to Battle Cry and beyond, Over There concentrates on how their shared interest in survival bonds together a socially, economically and racially disparate group of individuals who back in the States would be unlikely to even meet much less befriend one another.
One is a ghetto doper, another is earning college money and a third is a pragmatic new mother who sees the Army as a job like any other. (''Mommy's at work and everything's fine,'' she tells her infant son in a video e-mail after the squad's first combat engagement.) Their motivations for enlistment are as varied as their backgrounds; Tariq, an Iraqi-American recruit from Detroit, joined up in a burst of 9/11 patriotism, while Angel, an Arkansas teenager with a honey voice, couldn't face the folks back home after he failed a choir tryout in New York. Most mysterious of all is the squad intellectual, an alienated Ivy League grad known as Dim, reflecting the other soldiers' opinion of the mental acuity of somebody with a Cornell degree who winds up as an Army rifleman.
War movies, with only 90 minutes to roll out their characters and watch them grow, usually reduce them to one-note stereotypes. Over There, with 13 hour-long episodes to tell its story, has time for both subtlety and complexity, and a writing staff more than capable of producing it. When Dim, staring at the body of the first enemy gunman he's killed, murmurs, ''Smaller than I thought,'' he's talking about more than just the corpse.
Killing is central to the war in Iraq; on both sides, the war is not about territory but body counts, and the violence in Over There is terrifyingly sudden, frequent and grisly. The show is unflinching in its display of what high-tech weaponry does to a human body. Even more shattering is a hospital scene where a camera pulls back from a tight shot of a single soldier to reveal a long row of bedridden amputees.
That might sound like a political subtext at work, but Over There, though anti-war in the broadest and best sense -- no one can watch this without cursing the stupidity of the human race for its failure to find another way to resolve disputes -- is resolutely apolitical. Though producers Steven Bochco (who created NYPD Blue and Hill Street Blues) and Chris Gerolmo (who wrote the screenplay for Mississippi Burning) do not shy away from the war's deepest uglinesses, they are equally insistent on providing them with context.
So Over There's soldiers watch queasily, but without protest, as an intelligence officer tortures a captured terrorist. Are they war criminals? Does it make a difference that he's a colonel and a veteran, and they're rookie privates? Does it make a difference that the prisoner was captured while using a 6-year-old girl as a hostage? Does it make any difference that he's hiding a cache of 20 stolen Stinger missiles that could inflict thousands of casualties on U.S. troops and even civilian airliners? Moral distinctions that usually seem so sharp in our living rooms become uncomfortably hazy on the screen of Over There, where war's ambiguities loom large.
Lending an added element of incertitude is the show's eerily beautiful cinematography. Time-lapse shots of swirling dust and shimmering heatwaves make the desert not just a malevolent presence but a living character; pastel twilights contrast starkly with the lethal scenes played out beneath them. At times Over There almost resembles a deadly martial kabuki, as when two soldiers, both out of ammo, fumble clumsily with their equipment for what seems an eternity before one finally jams a clip into his rifle and kills the other.
Even a high-tech war sometimes reverts to the principles of Gettysburg or even Thermopylae. Over There may be ripped from the headlines, but it's an old story, as old as human tears.
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