Iraq Images,0479

EUGENE, Ore. -- The pictures are an intimate portrait of war -- stunning, raw and compelling.

The members of the Oregon National Guard shot the video and still images while they served in Iraq in 2004 and 2005.

They were powerful. But nonpolitical - just the story of soldiers during war. And Hillsboro-based documentary director Gary Mortensen saw them, he had to have them.

Mortensen and his filmmaking partner, Scot Laney, went back to the soldiers and interviewed them, then wove the interviews together with the images to make a documentary, "This is War: Memories of Iraq".

The film has won awards at regional film festivals and begun to attract some attention in Hollywood. The film is being screened for free in several Oregon communities in the coming weeks and after each screening some of the soldiers it portrays will be available to talk with audience members.

Mortensen and Laney, founders of the National Combat History Archive, have been collecting war footage for several years. The two men started with an archive of material from the Philippines that included footage of World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars, Mortensen said.

They've been adding to that archive ever since by offering to take soldiers photo albums and videos and digitize them. They give the discs of pictures back to the soldiers and retain a copy for their archive, which they make available to educators and others.

The two men kept hearing about video and stills shot by Oregon National Guard soldiers during their Iraq deployment and were taken with the images once they tracked them down.

The documentary includes the experiences of officers, enlisted men, and one woman, Rebekah-mae Bruns, a National Guard soldier and former photographer for the Cottage Grove Sentinel weekly newspaper.

"They represent the classic American dog face. They gripe about everything, and everything is humorous. I thought it was important to charge the film with as much gallows humor as possible," Mortensen said.

The story avoids politics, he said. Instead, it allows soldiers to tell their own stories in their own way.

"I wanted to make a film that's not really about Iraq at all. I wanted to make a film about America," he said.

"It's about what a soldier thinks and feels."

Some of the soldiers say the film does a good job of explaining what war is like for soldiers - good and bad.

The film received best documentary awards at the Sweet Onion Film Festival in Walla Walla, Wash., and at the Idaho International Film Festival in Boise last year. In March, Cinema City International Film Festival organizers in Los Angeles invited Mortensen to present the film there and the soldiers who went with him so impressed former Tonight Show sidekick Ed McMahon that he invited them to his home.