GUNNER PALACE BY PETER KEOUGH

Every war turns out an unauthorized version, and that’s the one that lingers deeper in the imagination than the official accounts of guts, glory, and patriotic accomplishment. World War II has Catch 22 (the novel more than the movie), Korea has M*A*S*H, Vietnam has Apocalypse Now, and the first Gulf War has Three Kings. The subversive cinematic take on our ongoing involvement in Iraq remains to be seen, but it will probably take a few hints from the Michael Tucker/Petra Epperlein documentary Gunner Palace. Although the film is more a slipshod notebook of half-finished observations and half-baked ideas, it may be enough to stimulate the curiosity and imagination of some ambitious filmmaker. Regular viewers, however, might come away unsatisfied.

Surely some Altman, Coppola, or Russell will be inspired by the set-up: with "major combat" over, the 2/3 Field Artillery, known as "The Gunners," is bivouacked in the bombed-out former palace of Saddam’s late son Uday. A unit ordinarily equipped with 155mm self-propelled howitzers designed to stop Soviet armor in its tracks must now must patrol Baghdad in thin-skinned Humvees. The troops are prey to kids with rocks and in dread of garbage on the roadside that may or may not harbor IEDs (improvised explosive devices). The irony of this situation is not developed by the filmmakers, one of many points of interest raised and dropped in their hit-or-miss approach.

Then there’s the cast of characters. No Army recruiter is going to court as a poster child SPC Stuart Wilf, who’s first spotted wearing a T-shirt that reads, "My Ass Smells Like Shit." (The film barely squeezed out a PG-13 rating for language.) An enlistee at 17 to escape a wasted youth taking drugs and raising hell in his backwater home town, he’s now the clown of the outfit. It would be nice to learn more about him, but instead the film offers sound bites and his impressive rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s "Star-Spangled Banner" on electric guitar.

It would also be nice to get to know SPC Richard Shaw, a brawny, professional, seemingly disillusioned soldier who knocks the teeth out of an insurgent suspect going for an AK-47 (off camera, as is nearly all the film’s action) and gamely trains some sad-sack Iraqi recruits who have little hope of ever becoming front-line material. Or the ragged Iraqi urchin strung out on glue whom the patrol picks up but can offer only a ride to somewhere more comfortable.

Although Tucker spent two months with the unit making the film, it seems much of significance eluded his camera, and the most exciting and tragic events are reported second- or third-hand. What he did manage to capture is so poorly put together that when a soldier with whom he’s said to have been close gets killed, I had to rack my memory to figure out who the poor fellow was.

Finally, though, there’s the music. What rock and roll was to Vietnam, hip-hop is to Iraq, and Tucker allows his subjects to lacerate the soundtrack with raps that represent some of the film’s most potent moments. He’s less successful with his attempt to render the film in a hip-hop style; the result is fitful energy at the expense of coherence.

"For you all, this is just a show," says Shaw at one point. "But we live in this movie." This rough cut from Tucker and Epperlein is a step in the right direction, but the movie that does justice to these lives has yet to be made. (85 minutes) At the Avon.