Video the video here, and all videos by MNFIRAQ

Standing in a gray room with walls pocked with bullet holes, a quartet of U.S. Army soldiers trade fire with an unseen enemy perched off-screen.

"You've just got to aim a little bit higher, kid," one soldier coaches another firing what appears to be a grenade launcher at a building several blocks away.

"Whew, that smells good," the first soldier says.

The movie, "Battle on Haifa Street, Baghdad, Iraq," conjures comparisons to war films from "Apocalypse Now" to "Full Metal Jacket," but this grainy, jumpy short is not fiction. It is combat footage posted for the world to see by the military on YouTube.

It's one of dozens that the Army has put on the Internet since March in an effort to tell its side of the story about an increasingly controversial war in Iraq. Judging by the numbers -- the Haifa Street video has been viewed more than a half million times -- the Army has been successful in luring eyes to its story.

Clifton, N.J. firefighter Chris Struening spent more than a year in Iraq serving as a military policeman when his National Guard unit was called to active duty in 2004. He said Tuesday that he liked that the YouTube videos portrayed more positive stories -- like injured civilians being helped by American doctors -- about the war effort. The mainstream media, he believes, doesn't spend enough time on such stories.

He said he thought the combat footage was accurate and showed enough to whet the appetite of a public weaned on Hollywood action movies without crossing a line prohibiting graphic violence. To be credible, the military has to show some of the fighting that its troops face in Iraq, he said.

"It's not like the military can say 'Everything's fine and dandy over there.' The American public, they're not stupid," Struening said. "They know what goes on. What better way to do it than have the military release choice footage? Something that maybe doesn't show as much, but shows just enough to satisfy the public's curiosity."

Anti-war activist Madelyn Hoffman, director of the Montclair-based New Jersey Peace Action, said she found the combat videos offensive and disturbing. But she said that the graphic violence confirmed her beliefs about the horrors of war.

"In some ways, seeing the actual footage of what's going on is better than what we get on national media. At least you see it without censorship," Hoffman said. "At least people are seeing the reality of it. It is my feeling that if more people saw the reality of it, more people would understand how violent and brutal it is and how much at risk our soldiers are. Footage like this, you can't watch it for very long. I can't watch it for very long."

She said she worried that such videos might attract young people to U.S. armed forces facing wartime recruiting shortfalls.

"It's like a glorified video game. Here you are, you can root for your team," she said. "When they succeed, you can cheer and maybe a year or two from now, you can enlist and become part of that team."

Army Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, whose combined press information center in Baghdad launched the YouTube channel, said in a telephone interview Tuesday that recruiting was never part of the considerations behind it.

From the military's perspective, the benefit of posting videos to the Web directly is that it can bypass a skeptical and increasingly war-weary mass media to publicize the positive stories it considers overlooked. In one video, soldiers give gifts to Iraqi Boy Scouts.

"(On YouTube) you're not showing the carnage of the devastation of the car bombs of the day," Garver said.

"I don't need to, that's on every TV channel. That story is getting out. I don't feel a need to tell that story. Some of the other stuff is not getting out on its own."

Story by Tom Meagher, The Herald News. Originally published in North Jersey.com

Labels: aitkins, army, guns, IED, Iraq, Iraqi War, MNFIRAQ, shootout, soldiers