In 'Only The Dead,' A Raw Look At War In Iraq

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Michael Ware takes notes while reporting with the U.S. military in Iraq. Franco Pagetti/VII Photo Agency/Courtesy of HBO

Hannah Bloch
Updated March 28, 20166:05 PM ET
Published March 28, 20163:59 PM ET

Near the beginning of Only the Dead See the End of War, a documentary premiering Monday at 9 p.m. Eastern on HBO, journalist Michael Ware says one thing he feared as he arrived as a Time magazine correspondent in Baghdad in 2003 was his own lack of experience. "I was still a junior reporter," he says. "I was convinced I had arrived late. I was terrified I'd make a fool of myself."

Ware was hardly a novice; he'd already spent more than a year covering Afghanistan (I first met him in late 2001, as he came through Pakistan from his native Australia, on his way to Afghanistan for Time). But the horrors he encountered over the course of his seven years covering Iraq, first for Time and then for CNN, were far worse than what he might have imagined.

While working for Time, Ware began shooting video with a small, handheld camera, documenting scenes from his reporting and daily life. It's from these hundreds of hours of footage (stored over the years at his mother's house back in Australia) that he's made this exceptional, difficult and necessary 90-minute film.

Co-directed by Bill Guttentag, an Oscar-, Emmy- and Peabody-winning documentary filmmaker, Only the Dead shows Iraq through Ware's eyes — both at the side of U.S. troops and local insurgents, and in detail that can sometimes be agonizing to watch.

http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/03/28/472165121/in-only-the-dead-a-raw-look-at-war-in-iraq

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1. I watched the last part, this morning!

As a Desert Storm vet, I tried to understand, tried to see it from the point of view of those soldiers...and I did!!

That's what worries me the most...that I could see myself doing the same thing, put into the same situation!