One war story, told on many fronts
‘Long Road Home’ looks at a single day in Iraq
It was a long road home — for everyone. National Geographic’s The Long Road Home (Tuesday, 9 ET/PT) tells the story of one battle in the Iraq War from multiple perspectives — of the American soldiers who fought, of their families back home and of Iraqis who were involved. Each of the eight episodes focuses on an individual and that person’s point of view on April 4, 2004, the day of the battle in Iraq’s Sadr City.
“It captures the soldiers and the families as everyday people and as everyday Americans,” says ABC News chief global affairs correspondent Martha Raddatz, who wrote the best seller on which the serie is based. “They are human beings who have to make split-second decisions about themselves and their brothers and sisters.
“Everything they do is a risk, and they rise to it,” she says. “This is the history of war captured in these eight hours. I hope people around the world understand ... what it means so they can have a voice in their own country and understand that sometimes there is absolutely no choice.”
In early 2004, the U.S. Army was in the Sadr City section of Baghdad to help, or so the soldiers thought. Sadr City, population 2.5 million, was considered “the safest place in Iraq,” and being deployed there meant the sort of duty many soldiers found boring.
These men from the 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment had arrived in Iraq on March 31; by April 4, they were in the cross hairs of insurgents’ AK-47s.
A 19-man platoon had been dispatched on its usual sanitation security duty, accompanying workers hosing off the sewage steaming in the streets.
Suddenly, the streets emptied. The silence was shocking.
Then the real shock came. Insur- gents, in houses and on rooftops, started firing at the Americans. The platoon sought shelter in a house and called for rescue, but the convoys trying to reach them became ensnared in their own firefights. Eight American soldiers and hundreds of Iraqis were killed on “Black Sunday”; 65 Americans and an unknown number of Iraqis were wounded.
This battle made it clear that the U.S. military was no longer simply trying to stabilize and promote peace in Iraq a year after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein; it was fighting an insurgency. Over the yearlong deployment, an additional 160 soldiers of the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division died.
On April 4, however, the mission was to extract the trapped platoon, recover the dead and rescue the injured.
“From my perspective, the story is both specific and universal at the same time, and I think those are stories I always respond to,” says Carolyn Bernstein, National Geographic’s executive vice president for global scripted development and production. “And from a Nat Geo perspective, it fits the bill as well: a very specific story about a specific incident during the Iraq War that took place in eight hours.”
The Long Road Home also showcases the women left behind on a grassy patch at Fort Hood, Texas, the country’s largest active-duty Army base, where National Geographic was allowed to build a rambling set.
Just as the men formed a deep brotherhood, the women of Fort Hood forged a sisterhood.
The actors playing the soldiers and those portraying their wives all reached out to their real-life counterparts, as showrunner and writer Mikko Alanne suggested.
“It’s the importance of the truth, the everyday reality of the people,” says Kate Bosworth, who plays Gina Denomy. “The truth is where you meet someone and bare your soul.”
Jason Ritter, who plays her husband, Capt. Troy Denomy, says: “I think we all had this sense that whatever we were doing was infinitesimal compared to what the real guys were doing. That level of humility. It’s not coming in and saying, ‘I have seen a lot of war movies.’ ”