BBC Four: How did you prepare to make a film that was potentially very dangerous?
Tom Roberts: I spent two months thinking, and talking to family and friends, about whether I really wanted to go. Because I've had a lot of experience in war zones, I was able with a certain degree of confidence to define what our role would be. When you go into a very dangerous situation you have to be confident that people are not going to make fundamental mistakes that can put all the soldiers' lives at risk. Not only that, if the crew doesn't appear to have the nous, doesn't have the sense of how to operate, the soldiers will feel very uncomfortable and think the filmmakers are a liability. You'll build a barrier between you and the soldiers. With us the opposite happened. Very quickly the soldiers realised that these were people they could trust, who were not going to freak out, and therefore they relaxed and we became part of their team. One of the reasons they did was that we made certain rules.

BBC Four: What were they?
TR: I told the soldiers that we would never ask them to do anything for the camera at any point when we left the base. I would not say turn left rather than right; I would not ask them to stay somewhere for an extra minute so we could get a better shot. I didn't want it on my conscience that if they turned a different way there might be a bomb on the side of the road. We also refused to go in

non-armoured vehicles; we had our own medical bags - the first rule in combat is that you always use the first-aid kit of the person who is injured; we even had $500 stitched into the webbing of our medical bags. The $500 was there so if we ever got separated from the unit we could hand over the money

View from the back seat

to someone and ask them to take us immediately to the nearest US soldier. Most people in Iraq would do that for $500. Because we had prepared carefully the soldiers relaxed and let us into their world.

BBC Four: There's been a lot of debate about the merit of embedded journalists: can they really be objective and so on? Did you have any concerns about being embedded?
TR: A documentary filmmaker is very different from a television news reporter. I come from is the objective, go and see how the world is tradition of filmmaking. The more you can enter a microcosm and burrow down into one particular reality I think the more you can discover how the world really works. So I didn't have anxieties about being embedded per se. I had anxieties about whether we would be given proper access and whether the wool would be pulled over our eyes. My experience of making films is that the closer you get to intense activity then the less possible it is for them to do that because they are too busy and too preoccupied.

BBC Four: Did you have any preconceptions about the troops you were going to be with?
TR: I certainly had the stereotypes in my head. There are Rambo-types. There are shallow-thinking individuals who wrap themselves in the American flag. You can go to any unit and find a tiny percentage that represents a certain kind of extreme ideology. But we encountered a totally different kind of person and I refuse to believe that we were in an oasis of rational behaviour in an irrational environment. That's not to say there aren't bad apples. Clearly there are. Abu Ghraib is absolute proof that the American military has made some terrible and ugly mistakes in Iraq. My view of Abu Ghraib, from what I know of command structures in the US military, is that it is not simply the failure of a few soldiers who disobeyed orders. I think the responsibility lies on Rumsfeld's shoulders. The White House sets the tone and temper and they should be smart enough to know that if you make certain kinds of statement they will get distorted and passed down so an atrocity like Abu Ghraib can happen. At the same time, what is the dominant experience? How does the US army operate in most cases? We were in a very well-led unit with very good officers.

BBC Four: Did the experience change your perception of the situation in Iraq?
TR: There were three big lessons. The first was that at a senior command level - the colonels - they had a much more sophisticated model of the world they operated in than I had been led to believe. That doesn't mean that they were going to be successful or that their model didn't have weaknesses and blind spots but they understood the complexity of trying to start a democratic process in Iraq: they understood the fundamental economic difficulties; they understood the real problems of trying to operate among the civilian population against insurgents. Secondly, I found that American army morale was much higher than I had been led to believe. While we there it became apparent that the unit had become a much higher risk and were being personally targeted.

This resulted in Colonel Allen calling all his men together and telling them that if anybody wants to return to their other job they were free to do so - and free to do so honourably. In the end nobody did. Not only did they not do that but their attitude was that they weren't going to let the officers down. Sergeant

The soldiers talk to a local Iraqi

Carpenter once said to me, when I asked him how he'd define his job and he said, "My job is to die before my officer". They were very committed. The third thing was that the level of chaos - the depth of the quagmire in Iraq - was much greater than I had been led to believe. Before I went out Western hostages were being taken, people were being beheaded, and bombs were blowing up huge numbers of civilians and arms targets. When I got there I found it to be even worse than that. The insurgent war was being reported here, but the internal conflict between rival tribes was not, nor was the economic violence - people were killing each other over the few economic spoils there are. So you have jihad war, a war of liberation, a war of occupation, a civil war between rival groups, and you have a war of blood revenge. There's also a high amount of general criminality.

BBC Four: You mentioned weaknesses of the US military. What are some of those?
TR: The US army's accounting mentality means that senior officers are not given slush funds - every penny has to be justifiably accounted for. The officers are not trusted to operate certain kinds of funding. In a guerrilla war you need to hire and pay for informants - and you're not going to get a receipt for that. The army also tended to be more concerned about the casualities that their own forces incurred than the casualities among their allies. That's a natural thing, but the lack of attention about translators or contractors being killed, and their failure to provide a level of protection for them, eroded their capacity to operate effectively. Another weakness of the US Army, I found, was that the level of translation being offered to them was very low. At one point they used a Kuwaiti translator. In another case they used a Kurd whose Arabic was quite weak and who was making up his translations. But the soldiers didn't speak Arabic effectively enough to know what.

 A COMPANY OF SOLDIERS HOMEPAGE