[jessefan]

http://www.tribnet.com/entertainment/story...p-5369412c.html

Music matters to American troops in Iraq
CHELSEA J. CARTER; The Associated Press

The images captured in "VH1 News Presents: Soundtrack to War," combines the use of music by America's soldiers and the unsettling pictures of war.

A group of soldiers stand on a rooftop, singing gospel music. Suddenly, bombs explode. Nearby, black smoke rises.


A tank crew cranks up a heavy metal song to gear up for combat.


The one-hour documentary examines the soldiers' use of music for inspiration, motivation and mourning. The result: a unique look at youth in war.


"Soundtrack to War," airing 9 p.m. Wednesday, follows soldiers of the Army's 1st Armored Division during their 15-month deployment in Iraq from April 2003 to July 2004.


"They couldn't do it without their music. They couldn't get through it without it," Australian filmmaker George Gittoes says.


Gittoes, who directed this documentary, relies on the soldiers to tell their own story as songs - including ones written by the soldiers - push the story along.


Several scenes in the film were featured in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11." But unlike Moore's film, "Soundtrack to War" centers on personal feelings rather than political ones.


The documentary begins with soldiers confiding how various songs - from Drowning Pool's "Let the Bodies Hit the Floor" to Mystikal's "Round Out the Tank" - psyche them up before battle.


One soldier explains why Drowning Pool's song was the motto for his tank crew during battles. Another tells how rapper Tupac Shakur's songs were funneled through headsets in a M-1 Abrams tank as it rolled from Kuwait into Iraq at the start of the war, and then changed to the Triple 6 Mafia when they hit the streets of Baghdad.


In one scene, a soldier talks about his affinity for punk rock and how few in his unit like the music. He tells Gittoes how there was another soldier he bonded with over the music - one who was later killed by a roadside bomb.


In one scene, Pfc. Yona Hagos raps about being "like a biological weapon" and surviving enemy gunfire. "The song is about trying to survive," he said. "I'm trying to get over it. It's not something you just get over in a few days or a few months." In the credits, viewers learn he was later hit with a rocket-propelled grenade.


In one of the film's most memorable scenes, soldiers are on patrol in Baghdad when a car bomb explodes, killing a family in a car. In the back seat, a child's toys are spattered with blood. The scene moves to two soldiers - Spc. Joshua Revak and Sgt. Trenton Dull - sitting near a tank, strumming acoustic guitars. They tell how they became friends during the war and wrote a song together to honor fallen comrades.


"No other American sitting back in America can ever come close to understanding what a soldier goes through on the streets of Baghdad," Revak says.


Later in the film, Gittoes returns to Revak.


"We've lost a lot of brothers. It gets tougher every day," he says. "The only way I've been able to deal with that is to write music."