It was the biggest, most intense fight since Vietnam. In 2004, 10,000 American troops stormed thousands of Islamic extremist insurgents in the city of Fallujah, Iraq. It was a decisive win for the U.S., with catastrophic casualties for the enemy. But the U.S. also suffered: 95 troops killed, 560 wounded. Now, stories of valor and honor are told firsthand in a new documentary: The Last 600 Meters. Today we speak with producer and director Michael Pack about the film and why PBS originally wouldn’t show it.

The following is a transcript of a report from “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
Watch the video by clicking the link at the end of the page.

Documentary: The order is seize the city. RPGs, small arms fire from everywhere. I wasn’t worried about, you know, getting shot or getting wounded. I was worried about the guys to my left and right. I told him that I wanted to go and he looked at me and said ‘sorry you are going to die.’

Michael Pack: People didn’t really know what happened. And I wanted to tell that story. So I filmed the interviews with veterans of that battle in 2007, three years after the battles when their memories were fresh and they were still young. And we found the veterans by finding the most important footage from those battles. And then we look for the people in the footage. So they look right at camera, they tell their story without comment and they describe what you see in the footage.

Documentary: Thump right through there. The round went in and came out the back of the Kevlar. So he should have been a gonner. You know, the docs were right there with us and everybody is, we thought he was dead, you know, we thought we’d pull off his Kevlar and there be a mess of brains in there and he’d be done, you know, and he walked out of there. And Tycki will tell you he kept repeating things, “Tycki, you got the squad.” You know he is trying to, he knows he is gone, he knows he is out of the fight but he wants us to be successful.

Pack: you have a feeling of being there. And, and as you know, it’s called The last 600 Meters because a special forces sniper says, “I don’t make foreign policy, I deliver the last 600 meters of it, meaning what he could see through his sniper scope. And we tried to say true to that, the, the ground truth, what it looked like on the ground to the people who fought there from corporals and sergeants to the sort of one star generals who were actually in the field. We finished a version of it in 2008, and PBS declined to broadcast it, saying it was too pro-military.

Sharyl: Because PBS usually airs your documentary films.

Pack: Exactly. I’ve had 15 films that have been broadcast nationally on PBS. They’ve all done very well and they’ve liked them all. And since this was funded by the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, I thought it would be easier than most to get it broadcast on PBS. But they declined. And my wife, who, you know, Gina, who’s my business partner, and I went to PBS every few years begging them to broadcast it. And now after 17 years, the president of PBS Paula Kerger made what I think is a courageous decision to reverse those years of saying ‘no’ and said ‘yes’ and broadcast the film very recently, the day before Veteran’s Day, which also was the 250th birthday of the Marine Corps. And these were mostly marine battles, and now it’s streaming on Amazon distributed by PBS. So it has a very unusual history.

Sharyl: What do you think changed their mind?

Pack: It, it’s really hard to tell, I think Sharyl, that in those first years especially, it was all about their ideology and what they thought of the war and their opinions of the war clouded their ability to see what these people did on the ground, whether you like the war in Iraq or don’t like it, think it was right or wrong. We need to celebrate the courage and the valor of these people on the ground and what putting their lives online for us, the American people. And it was harder to see that without looking, thinking about what you thought of the war. And so I think maybe years later it’s easier to see that. And, and I think the fate of the veterans mirror that they had a little bit of the problem that Vietnam veterans have, that people who don’t like the war didn’t like them, even though they didn’t make policy. They were just doing what we the American people asked them to do. So maybe it’s easier to celebrate and appreciate them now.

Documentary: I don’t know about other wounded marines but if you get wounded you feel as if you failed. Like you are trained not to get wounded.

Sharyl (on-camera): Fallujah remains the defining conventional-style battle of the Iraq War and the heaviest sustained fighting U.S. forces faced in a single city in more than thirty years. The Last 600 Meters is streaming on PBS and Amazon Prime.

Watch video here.

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IPAK-EDU is grateful to Sharyl Attkisson as this piece was originally published there and is included in this news feed with mutual agreement. Read More