To make the film, he mined hundreds of hours of footage recorded with a cheap handycam to tell a story about the war—or a few stories, really—that have rarely been presented in such visceral, immediate and devastating fashion. For as much as Only the Dead is about the evolution of the insurgency in Iraq and the birth of what would become the terror group ISIS, and as much as it lays bare the toll the war exacted on those who fought it, it is also very much about the deal that Ware made, and what it cost him.
The viewer sees what Ware saw. They get bounced around when firefights begin or explosions go off, just as he did. In one scene, we even hear his breathing as he meets armed insurgents under cover of night. Arriving in northern Iraq after reporting extensively from Afghanistan, Ware hurried to Baghdad after it was conquered by the American military. Aided by a wonderful group of Iraqi colleagues who are remembered—and in one heartbreaking case, mourned—with great affection in the film, he got to work.
That included some Iraqis who had been fired, disastrously, from their posts in the Iraqi military and others who later linked up with Al Qaeda in Iraq AQI , the ruthless jihadist group run by a little-known Jordanian named Abu Musab al-Zaraqawi.
AQI sent him propaganda videos showing jihadists beheading westerners or rapturously sending off suicide bombers—scenes the film includes.
The more violence he saw, the more he wanted to understand the men who were behind it. Only the Dead shows that while Ware may have escaped his time in Iraq with his life, his mind and soul were badly scarred. The most poignant example comes when Joe Walker, a young Marine 2nd Lieutenant, shows Ware and photographer Yuri Kozyrev around Observation Point Hotel, a crumbling shell of a building in Ramadi that was taking fire every single day.
Walker openly wrestles with the impact the experience is having. You start hating this place. In war, everybody lies. Our government. Their government. The bad guys. The good guys. Even the civilians, through exaggeration and confusion. The difference with Zarqawi was that his was such a dark and hellish agenda that there was something different about receiving that one tape. I can almost tell you the exact frame that it suddenly occurred to me that I could do something and I was choosing not to.
What I was trying to do was film the indifference of the soldiers, but then it occurred to me that I had become as indifferent as they were. He needed more time off, but his request was denied, and now he's not coming back, the blog reports. It's unclear exactly how long he's been on leave, but the last update on his personal website was on Dec.
Ware is a successful and well-loved correspondent, and fans have been getting curious about his absence. His work for CNN over the past four years has been an astonishing and brutally honest look at the causes and results of war. Not easy subject matter to watch… but he made us care. His urgency and passion burst through our television sets and made us pay attention, made us want to understand.
His footage heightens — perhaps even changes — the language of the war documentary. Many films have been made about 21st-century conflict in Iraq. A brazen type with a poetic streak, the reporter embedded himself with U.
He was the rare reporter trusted by multiple sides, and put himself in grave danger even by the standards of wartime journalists.
He explained battlefield situations in which he turned away from a Marine on one side of him to talk to another, and then turned back to find the first had been killed in the interim. Why if you turn left you die and if you turn right you lived? Ware, 46, had a low-budget hand-held camera from pretty much the moment he arrived in Iraq for Time, and soon after began shooting footage wherever he went.
He had no intention of making a film, but when he began sifting through them several years ago to jog his memory for an as-yet-unwritten book, he thought there might be a cinematic story to tell. Ware soon became a trusted emissary for Abu Musab Zarqawi, the infamous late leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq who turns into a Kurtzian obsession for the reporter.
Zarqawi would stage and then film beheadings and suicide attacks on Westerners, and when he wanted the world to see his handiwork, he would often deliver footage to Ware.
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