Except its not.
This is a slightly edited video taken from the gun camera of a U.S helicopter in Iraq engaging with a small group of men on the ground. Amongst the eleven men killed were two Reuters staff members, one of them a local driver, the other a reputed 22 year old war photographer. Later in the video when a van arrives to pick up the wounded men and presumably take them to a hospital the Apache opens fire on them as well, killing the men and seriously wounding the two children inside the van. The video has been made public by the important wikileaks.org and the longer version of the video is available on their website as well as a transcript of the exchange and further material.
A U.S Apache helicopter responds to reported small arms fire but fails to positively identify the shooters. spotting a group of men peering round the corner of building and believing them to be carrying an RPG the helicopters open fire on the group of men killing most of them. The two journalist appear to initially survive and the helicopter opens fire on one as he crawls away. The camera watches the second one crawl in the gutter, as over the video we hear the gunner saying "come on buddy all you gotta do is pick up a weapon" which would give him license to open fire. However he doesn't, he never had one, the RPG (later identifed by ground troops as "something that looks like an RPG round" was in fact a telephoto lens camera. When the van arrives and three men get out to pick the wounded up the helicopter pilots ask for permission to engage and once given they spray the van and the men with machine gun fire. In the process of disabling the van and killing the men they also hit two children in the front seat. On a second watch you can clearly see them moving in the front seat. The ground troops arrive and as they move to secure the area they drive over one of the dead bodies of the Reuters staff member.
In the longer and more complete video there is a sense of the complete context of the day's events, that the helicopter was engaged in a series of contacts around the area, and minutes after the events that led to the journalists' death they attack a building having seen men who are clearly carrying AK47s walk into it.
It is an incredibly powerful video, both moving and disturbing and a powerful documentary in its singular perspective, that of the gunner of the Apache helicopter. It is both at the same time a truly immersive mediated experience, whilst maintaining the sterile distance afforded to us by a barrier of pixels.
Over at his blog Remediation, Richard Grusin, calls the video a more powerful item of media documentary than even the Abu Ghraib photos. I would agree. Whereas the Abu Ghraib photographs were illustrative of a singular event (which was symbolic of a general culture of dehumanization symptomatic of a jingoistic post 9/11 rhetoric) this video is both shocking because of its indiscriminate slaughter, but also because of its wider context and sense of common practice. Sadly the anomaly here is the fact that we have got to see it and that the video was made public.
YouTube has a bunch of AC-130 videos but the one above isgame footage from Call of Duty Modern Warfare, which I know I keep coming back to. It will take you seconds to realise the connection between the two
videos. In one of the games's most realistically rendered and also individual sequences the player escorts a unit of SAS
men on the ground through an enemy infested village, giving them air protection, al the while accompanied by the narration of the operators, in an uncomfortably uncanny similarity to the exchanges in the Collateral Murder video and especially to this one below.
Richard Grusin, whose blog i mentioned above, writes about what he calls the premediation of war through FPS games, as especially illustrated through the similarities of the helicopter attack in the first video and actions performed by the player in the game's chappter called 'death from above'. He cites many of the actions that the player undertakes within the game as an explaination of the zeal of the helicopter gunner in his desire to engage the wounded man. Especialy an attribute called 'last stand' which in the game allows for wounded or shot characters or players to fire off a couple of last shots whilst crawling on the floor. Now i don't particularly ascribe to this, neither to i give much weight to his speculation that the 'pilot' mission in Modern Warfare 2 being presented as a reward therefore elevates the position of helicopter gunner. I would suggest that the scarcity of the role and the difficulty of getting a position as an aerial gunner are probably sufficient. He also suggests the gunner's speech style is a the result of mediation through the game which i don't really agree with again, the YouTube video above is an example of footage that was released before the game, instead I would suggest the game is simply an accurate mediated reproduction of the experience.
However within the blog post he also talks about the Collateral Murder video and the game meeting to bridge the gap between reality and war. How, as a game played by millions of youths, many of whom are the key demographic of army volunteers, and some of whom are soldiers actually fighting in Iraq, it premediates the affectivity of war, and he suggests through networked play the sociability of warfare and soldiering.
This is more interesting to me personally and ties into subjects already touched upon on this blog. The Collateral Murder video and its uncanny realtionship to the CoD game level only serves to pose the question again: what does it mean to play a game such as MW when its realtionship to reality is so permeable?
Does it amount to watching war through a Baudrillard-ian prism: "the Iraq war did not take place?". I don't think so. Where does reality place itself in a game such as MW? Through the act of play we not only undergo a simulation of an event, or in this case of a non event, but rather perform through it. The vibration of the controller and increased realism and detail of game such as MW do serve to premediate our perceptions, but the sight of the violence in Collateral Murder was not premediated and therefore reduced by my playing of MW, rather it was uncomfortably contextualized close to home. I am not a believer in the holy grail of immersive simulation, subscribing instead to the opinion that immersion is a fallacy, and a politically dangerous goal, but the act of performing the AC-130 scene in MW allowed me an uncomfortable proximity to Collateral Murder which ties back into the talk of guilt from my previous post. I am not suggesting that the act of play is similar to the act of war, or of killing, but the game's attempt to create a realistic experience and my playing through of the in-game level recreates a cognitive proximity between me and the real life video.
Does playing the game allow me a greater understanding or an insight into the events shown in Collateral Murder? I think so. Does the game affect the manner in which the soldiers in the video behave? I don't know. I think its a big assumption to make that the pilots in the video have played CoD, although it is very possible that they have, (although the game itself was also not released till at least two months after the event itself took place) I also think that it is also a big asumption that the game would affect their behaviour over the training and highly authoritarian hierarchical structure that they have to fit into as Army aerial gunners. I believe games are a product of their society not that society is a product of its games.
But of greater significance is how do games help us to read the events shown in the video? Do they only serve to dilute their meaning, and continue a narrative of assumed conflict and of a mediatised war happening 'over there', easily assimilated and dismissed through selective one sided mediatised representations, propagating the hero narrative at the expense of the story of the full cost of war?
Perhaps games provide us with an antidote to the passive 'clean' war that the first Iraq war was synonymous of. I can't quite put my finger on how i feel about the relationship of my game play experience to Collateral Murder. I feel guilty at the fact that i played the game's level with such enjoyment, although i feel that the continuity between the game and the real life event is not necessarily a negative thing, nor is any feeling of guilt emerging from recontextualised play. Instead it suggests that CoD4 has the potential to become a critical text in the manner in which we read modern conflict and our relationship to it, as dictated by how we as players read it.
Many of the comments written underneath of the AC130 footage (the real life one, not the game footage) are people reminding others that this isn't game footage but reality, showing that as media consumers the game has almost entirely taken over our reading of this footage. Previous footage of aerial warfare was demonstrative of the faceless war of 'surgical strike missile cams', 'collateral damage' and generic war on terror broad brush strokes. The CoD 4 footage allowed for a narrative of participation to be imposed onto these images, allowing for players to feel a cognitive ownership of this imagery. With the release of Collateral Murder a new narrative has emerged. It is too easy to condemn to pilots and their chatter (which is what has shocked most), and too easy to blame games (mainly because i don't think they are to blame), although i don't understand the morality of opening fire on unarmed men trying to help the wounded, the pilots believe that they are firing on armed combatants who are putting their colleagues at risk. Their are military analysts who have looked at the video and say that it is clear that the journalists were accompanied by armed men, i believe the pilots were doing their job, the fact that we as a society allow for that job to be the killing of other human beings is not the fault of 'video game brainwashing' as some liberal commentators are already saying. Rather i believe that having played the game in question has allowed me a response and insight into the video of the killings that is not afforded to people who find it easier to condemn rather than to analyze.
So perhaps the leaked video will not have the impact of the Abu Ghraib photos (although i am uncertain now what exactly that affect was) because i don't think that it is showing an atrocity as we commonly understand the term, but rather a horrific mistake. It is showing the kind of violence that we as a society are allowing to take place by acquiescing that 'its their fault for bringing a child to a battle', by not holding events like this to account, by propagating an army centric vision of a battle for 'liberation', by not readdressing our assimilated imagery of this ongoing conflict. Because this video brings us closer than ever before to the death of two out of 139 journalists who have been killed in the conflict. A potential 137 other similar events. Or any of the 104,000 civillians since the conflict has begun, and makes us think about our role within that.
And the game, what does it do in all this? The game is like all media, all books, all films ever made about war, if played or read right it can help change your reading of the events, and the way in which you chose to participate in them. Blaming games is easy but looking deep and hard at why we allow innocent civilians to be killed by men we claim as our country's heros is harder. Change the channel.
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