The War Tapes is a collection of video clips filmed by National Guardsmen with their own handhelds. "I'm not supposed to talk to the media," one solider says into the camera. "I'm not the damned media!" the soldier behind the camera shouts back, clearly insulted.

The soldiers have been sent to Iraq to run escorts for Halliburton trucks, dodging IEDs, snipers, and mortar attacks. The footage is surprisingly steady and well-shot for a bunch of amateurs, and it's fascinating: the firefights, the car-bombed corpses, the cursing frustration, soldiers gathering around a glass cage to place bets on a fight between a scorpion and a big spider, the casual jokes at the expense of their Lebanese-American comrade Sergeant Zack Bazzi: "Today we kill Bazzi and everybody that looks like Bazzi—that makes for a lot of targets today." The Stateside segments and interviews with the soldiers' family are less interesting, the kind of thing you'd see on any war documentary. But the quotes from the foot soldiers are revealing: "Why the fuck am I sitting here guarding this truck full of cheesecake? Are these people crazy? And: "The priority of KBR [Halliburton] making money outweighs the priority of safety." And: "Yeah, Iraq will be a free and democratic society, which, in turn, should stabilize the whole Middle East for a freer, more stable earth as we know it—and after that happens, maybe we can buy everybody in the world a puppy."