Jay Dorleus, an Iraq War veteran, looks at how the Iraq War is portrayed in movies and TV shows.
He looks at the realism of sniper battles in Clint Eastwood's "American Sniper" (2014), starring Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller; "The Wall" (2017), starring John Cena and Aaron Taylor-Johnson; and "Green Zone" (2010), starring Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, and Brendan Gleeson. He discusses his own experience finding and disposing of IEDs when watching "The Hurt Locker" (2008), starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, and Guy Pearce; Denzel Washington's "A Journal for Jordan" (2021), starring Michael B. Jordan; and "Cherry" (2021), starring Tom Holland. He examines how PTSD is portrayed in "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" (2016), starring Joe Alwyn, Vin Diesel, and Kristen Stewart. He explains what urban warfare in Iraq was like, as seen in "Stop-Loss" (2008), starring Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt; and "Generation Kill" (2008), starring Alexander Skarsgård. Finally, he breaks down the infamous "Triangle of Death," as portrayed in "War Dogs" (2016), starring Jonah Hill, Miles Teller, and Ana de Armas.
Follow Jay Dorleus:
https://www.youtube.com/@GreenBeretChronicles
https://www.instagram.com/green_beret_chronicles/
Veterans who have been affected by PTSD can contact the PTSD Foundation of America at ptsdusa.org or the Wounded Warrior Project at woundedwarriorproject.org.
He looks at the realism of sniper battles in Clint Eastwood's "American Sniper" (2014), starring Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller; "The Wall" (2017), starring John Cena and Aaron Taylor-Johnson; and "Green Zone" (2010), starring Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, and Brendan Gleeson. He discusses his own experience finding and disposing of IEDs when watching "The Hurt Locker" (2008), starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, and Guy Pearce; Denzel Washington's "A Journal for Jordan" (2021), starring Michael B. Jordan; and "Cherry" (2021), starring Tom Holland. He examines how PTSD is portrayed in "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" (2016), starring Joe Alwyn, Vin Diesel, and Kristen Stewart. He explains what urban warfare in Iraq was like, as seen in "Stop-Loss" (2008), starring Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt; and "Generation Kill" (2008), starring Alexander Skarsgård. Finally, he breaks down the infamous "Triangle of Death," as portrayed in "War Dogs" (2016), starring Jonah Hill, Miles Teller, and Ana de Armas.
Follow Jay Dorleus:
https://www.youtube.com/@GreenBeretChronicles
https://www.instagram.com/green_beret_chronicles/
Veterans who have been affected by PTSD can contact the PTSD Foundation of America at ptsdusa.org or the Wounded Warrior Project at woundedwarriorproject.org.
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TechTranscript
00:00 [Music]
00:06 Roadside IEDs were very common in Iraq.
00:08 They were almost part of our daily lives.
00:12 We wake up, eat breakfast, and then go defuse roadside IEDs.
00:15 My name is Jay Dorlias, and I was a 1st Sergeant in the United States Army.
00:20 I spent two separate deployments to Iraq.
00:23 I was mainly doing route clearance, looking for IEDs, and also disposing of IEDs.
00:29 Today, we're going to look at Iraq war battles from movies and TV shows and judge how real they are.
00:36 [Music]
00:42 Right, so the formation that they're using right here to patrol through the city
00:47 is not one that I recommend nor have I ever seen done downrange,
00:51 because what you have here is just a cluster of people just walking down the street.
00:57 And all it takes is a grenade or an RPG to be fired at them, and they would take multiple casualties,
01:04 when in reality what they should be doing is either push the vehicles ahead of them
01:09 or push the vehicles behind them.
01:11 And then between the personnel themselves, they should have at least five meters standoff in between them.
01:17 [Gunfire]
01:22 If I have any suspicion that a vehicle-borne IED is coming towards me,
01:27 the first thing I'm going to do is take cover, because when it does go off, shrapnel is going to go everywhere.
01:32 If you're just standing on the road like these guys were, you're probably going to get hit by something.
01:36 They were essentially in a line firing out the car, and then Chris Collis firing from above.
01:41 They're in his line of fire, right?
01:43 So a lot could have gone wrong with just them standing in the road like that.
01:47 In reality, what they should have done was get behind cover and then engaging the car.
01:52 And then for as many times as they engaged it, they should have hit the driver.
01:56 [Gunfire]
02:00 Suicide bombers were a common threat in Iraq because it's one of the tools that they found was very effective.
02:08 And it's harder for us to detect and defeat because you literally have a moving bomb heading towards you.
02:15 In the streets of Iraq, at any given time, you have hundreds of cars just parked there.
02:20 That's one technique that they would use also is they would pack the cars with bombs
02:24 and just leave them sitting on the side of the roads where they know we typically go out on patrols.
02:29 And then once we go by, they set it off.
02:32 What I've experienced in Iraq, typically when they put bombs in the cars,
02:37 the bottom of it is sagging because that's where all the load is.
02:41 So that's something that we look out for.
02:43 But it didn't have any of the signs that I typically see downrange.
02:47 [Gunfire]
02:53 So typically when you call in an airstrike, things are going bad.
02:58 Like you really need rounds on target right away or else you're going to be dead.
03:03 The way that was portrayed is also not accurate, right,
03:08 because Chris Kyle wouldn't have the authority to just say, hey, put rounds on target, right?
03:13 That's a ground force commander's decision, mainly because once you release that round, like, you're owning it.
03:21 [Gunfire]
03:25 There's a lot of things that plays into account as for why they missed it.
03:29 Sandstorm's probably the main reason.
03:31 When it comes to putting rounds on the objective, with a sandstorm like this,
03:35 they probably weren't able to properly laze their target because the aircraft itself has certain lasers on it
03:41 that they can use to actually pinpoint where the round's supposed to go.
03:44 So the sandstorm could have threw the laser off to where it wouldn't properly laze
03:49 or didn't have a clear visual of it.
03:51 Between Chris Kyle and his sniper buddy, somebody should have what we call an ISLID on their person
03:56 to where they can mark where they want the rounds to go.
04:00 [Gunfire]
04:05 Sandstorm do happen pretty frequently, especially during the summer.
04:08 Typically, once the sandstorm comes around, everybody's hunkered down because you can't see anything.
04:14 You've got to know where your rounds are going at all times.
04:16 So if we can't clearly identify where the rounds are going, then, yeah, we're not shooting at anybody.
04:20 We'll probably just hunker down and wait for it to pass.
04:23 I would give American Sniper a 5 out of 10, mainly because of the realism with the VBIED
04:31 and then also the technique that these guys use as they were patrolling just didn't make any sense.
04:37 [Gunfire]
04:43 So that's what we call indirect fire, meaning the enemy is anywhere from 200 to 300 meters away
04:50 and they are launching mortar rounds, either 60s or 81-millimeter mortars towards the convoy.
04:59 It's a tactic that the enemy used a lot because they set up the IED, and then once it goes off,
05:07 it disables the convoy, the convoy being all the vehicles that are moving through,
05:12 and then they're able to lob mortars and cause additional damage.
05:16 [Gunfire]
05:21 Having a turret system which allows you to maneuver a gun or shift the gun from left to right is beneficial
05:28 because it allows you to transition from covering your element as it moves.
05:34 [Explosion]
05:36 [Bleep]
05:37 [Grunting]
05:39 He either hit a landmine, and the landmine had to be, you know, situated just right to hit, you know,
05:46 around the fuel tank for it to cause that big of a fireball.
05:50 But in this situation right here, the only thing I could think of is, you know, he ran over a landmine.
05:55 Landmines were very common to find in Iraq.
05:57 One of my first missions was actually low crawling to a landmine
06:01 and going through my procedures as a 12th Bravo to dispose of it.
06:05 And it's all leftover munitions from, like, previous conflict that that country has been part of.
06:12 [Bleep]
06:15 So they're digging fighting positions, all right, fighting positions, especially in open terrain like this.
06:20 Digging that hole gives them the ability to lay down and essentially hide from the enemy.
06:25 It gives them cover, all right, and all they got to do then is just pop up
06:29 and then engage the enemy while their body is still concealed.
06:33 I would give this a seven.
06:36 The sniper! Hit him!
06:37 Hey, sir, where is he?
06:38 He's right up there. Take it down the alley.
06:43 That actually happens a lot. Iraq is a lot more urbanized than Afghanistan.
06:47 You won't typically find snipers just laid out on the ground, right, as opposed to urban area.
06:51 They have buildings, they have, you know, stores.
06:54 They have a bunch of different places that they can hide.
06:57 But typically you won't notice a sniper or find a sniper unless he wants you to know that he's there.
07:02 So as soon as he cracks off that first shot, then that's when you'll know, hey, we have a sniper on our hand,
07:08 and by then somebody's already hit.
07:10 I want you to stay right on the backs of your shooters, all right? They will take you in.
07:14 So he's talking about a stack.
07:16 So a stack is, you know, like a group of four guys, and they typically go in a clear building.
07:21 So if he's telling them to stay on the back of his shooters, then he wants them right behind,
07:25 either the number one, two, three, or four men, and then he'll just go into the building with them.
07:30 Personally, when I'm conducting CQB, I don't want anybody touching me or on my back.
07:34 I'd rather go in, clear the building first, and let you know, hey, it's clear, you can come in.
07:39 This is no WMD site.
07:45 There's never been any evidence found that Iraq actually had WMDs.
07:49 So the whole WMD debacle, I'll say, that caused us to go into Iraq, you know, I remember in 2003,
07:58 I was actually around Haditha Dam, which was one of the places that we thought WMDs were being stored.
08:06 And it's disappointing to later on find out that it didn't exist, right?
08:11 So we essentially went in under false pretenses, you know, lost a bunch of soldiers.
08:17 I lost some good friends, you know, for the cause that we thought was righteous, and that ended up not being the case.
08:23 I would give this a four out of ten, mainly because of how they handled the sniper.
08:27 Everyone was out in the open with a sniper on the loose.
08:31 He could have easily just, you know, picked everyone off before they even made it to the building where the sniper was actually hiding.
08:37 When he says control your fires, that just means, hey, don't shoot all your ammunition at once.
08:49 Make sure you choose a string of fire that makes sense, right?
08:53 Typically a basic combat load for a soldier is 210 rounds, right?
08:58 That's what we carry on our person whenever we go out on missions.
09:01 So that's seven magazines.
09:03 You don't want to run out of ammunition.
09:05 It happened to me a couple of times, you know, eight to ten hour battles, you're going to run out of ammunitions.
09:09 What we teach soldiers is to make sure the guns talk, right?
09:13 So you want the guns to talk, meaning I fire three rounds, I stop, he fires three rounds, right?
09:18 And it just goes down the line.
09:19 So, and then we repeat.
09:21 We don't stop firing at once, right?
09:23 So we want to take turns.
09:24 This is probably the most accurate, you know, scene I've seen as far as gun battles.
09:35 There's a lot of standoff and they're just engaging rounds back and forth.
09:39 That's your typical engagement in Iraq during the time period that I was there.
09:50 What you saw there was an AT4.
09:52 It is a common issue item for infantry guys and it was used properly too.
09:59 You want to make sure you have standoff.
10:00 That's getting them away from the walls so they have enough clearing for the rounds to go off, all right?
10:06 And then before they fire, they check their back blast, make sure nobody's behind them.
10:16 That is an accurate depiction of what happens if you're triggered by PTSD.
10:21 My PTSD took on the form of anger.
10:23 So I was, you know, going, you know, out drinking and I was getting into a lot of bar fights.
10:28 You know, cops would go to arrest my buddy, I would jump on the cop and next thing you know, I'm in handcuffs.
10:32 So I had to seek help to, I guess, get me in the right state of mind, right?
10:37 To refocus my state of mind and that help came in the form of me getting thrown in a jail.
10:42 But it worked because 20 years later, here I am.
10:44 12 o'clock, what do you see?
10:46 Beyonce, Destiny's Child dude right in front of you.
10:50 He doesn't really know where he's at.
10:52 So his buddies had to come him down and then refocus him.
10:57 You're not on the battlefield anymore, right?
10:59 So that is a pretty accurate depiction.
11:02 Different people requires different things.
11:05 In this particular situation, that's what that guy needed, right?
11:08 But every soldier is different and your fellow soldiers will know exactly how to bring you back.
11:15 I would rate this a nine out of 10 because they do a really good job at the rooftop battle scene and also depicting what actually happens when you have a PTSD episode.
11:29 Got that? Yeah.
11:31 There we go.
11:35 During the beginning of the war, we started to incorporate robots.
11:39 This one specifically is what we call a Talon, right?
11:42 And the whole premise behind it was to limit soldiers actually getting injured because prior to we were using mind detectors and going up and looking for IEDs in that manner and guys were getting injured left and right.
11:54 So it was a lifesaver.
11:57 Good to go.
11:58 All right, wagon set up, bot moves.
12:03 Wagon's having a bad day, boys.
12:05 So I've never had one of those, nor have I ever used one of those before.
12:10 And for that exact reason, it doesn't really travel well over terrain.
12:14 In Iraq, the terrain is rarely even.
12:17 When it was time to go put, you know, charge on whatever device that we were going to put the charges on, we just built a little handle on the actual charge and it went on the claw.
12:28 And that's how we were able to put the charge on the actual bomb, not on the wagon like they used in the clip here.
12:35 I can't get a shot.
12:41 When you start talking about IEDs, you have two separate ways that they can be initiated.
12:45 You have victim initiated, which is pressure plate or command wire.
12:49 And then you have remote control, which in this case it was remote control.
12:53 We do have devices that are supposed to mitigate them being able to remotely activate the IEDs.
12:59 We call them jammers.
13:01 It's like a big antenna that sends out all these different signals.
13:03 And if it doesn't recognize the signal, it jams the frequency to where it can't get to the IED.
13:08 It can't close the loop.
13:09 So I would give this one a four.
13:11 Just the realism of him actually going up and putting the charge on the IED wasn't accurate at all.
13:16 Faster, faster!
13:19 We'll lose your fans!
13:20 We'll lose your fans!
13:21 Triangle of Death was an incredibly dangerous area that was located south of Baghdad.
13:27 Fallujah was one of those places.
13:29 I actually spent some time there in 2004, and the IED threat and also the insurgent threat down there was ridiculous.
13:37 All of Saddam's loyal fighters were all around that area, and they were very experienced.
13:45 We had a bunch of different units responsible for doing different things.
13:48 For example, we knew there was an IED threat, so we enlisted combat engineers like myself to go clear the routes.
13:56 And then we also had infantry guys going out on patrols every morning and evening to deter the enemy from actually coming out.
14:04 They weren't people necessarily behind us, chasing us and firing at us.
14:12 It was coming from the sides, right?
14:14 They would set up ambushes, and as vehicles were driving down the road, they would engage them through that manner.
14:19 I would rate this a 5 out of 10.
14:22 How the highway chasing was depicted, that's not something that those guys do.
14:27 And if they did, these guys would not have made it out of there.
14:30 Roadside IEDs were very common in Iraq.
14:39 They were almost part of our daily lives.
14:43 We'd wake up, eat breakfast, and then go defuse roadside IEDs.
14:46 So they would place these IEDs in a variety of places.
14:49 And as the war progressed, their techniques got more and more complicated,
14:57 because as we discovered a technique that they were using, they adjust, and they found another way.
15:03 It was like playing chess.
15:05 So they started off placing them on the side of the roads.
15:09 Then they realized that we found a way to easily detect them on the side of the road.
15:14 Then they started putting them in the middle of the roads, in potholes, in puddles of water.
15:19 Once we found out how to defuse those, then they started putting them in culverts to where we couldn't even see them.
15:25 Based on what I saw in this scene, this IED was on the side of the road.
15:34 Because when the IED went off, it pushed the vehicle and it flipped it a couple of times.
15:38 If it was in the middle of the road, it would have pushed the vehicle up and essentially just disintegrated.
15:44 This IED was probably triggered using what we like to call command detonation.
15:49 So in a desert situation like this, you need an aiming point.
15:53 So you as the bad guy could have enough standoff, and you know when to send it off, right?
15:58 So as the vehicle comes, let's say I'm using a pole.
16:01 As the first vehicle travels down the road, as soon as it hits that aiming point, which is a pole, then I know to set it off.
16:07 They had command wire probably unraveled, and then once they saw the vehicle hit the aiming point, they pulled the igniter.
16:15 And that's how they were able to set it off.
16:17 You can literally see the wire if you're trained to look for it.
16:21 And a lot of these units would have issues because they didn't have the trained eye that a combat engineer would,
16:28 where we went to school to learn how to look for these things, right?
16:31 They would just drive down the road and then get blown up.
16:33 I would give this a 7 out of 10.
16:37 The IED scene was on point.
16:40 They could have done a lot better job at the follow-through after the IED went off.
16:45 Hey, Ice. Just checked if the cell--
16:48 [gunshot]
16:49 Just looking at the scene itself with him just standing out in the open,
16:54 cavalo is not properly secured.
16:57 There's just a lot wrong with it right off the bat.
17:00 His chin strap is supposed to be buckled, and it was just dangling.
17:05 It's supposed to be buckled and fastened to where if he does have to run, it's not falling off.
17:10 [gunshot]
17:11 [panting]
17:13 Get away from me!
17:16 I understand what he was doing there, but there's a more efficient way he could have done that,
17:21 and that's to just get down and just low crawl.
17:24 He had enough cover. He could have easily just got behind or in some of those brushes
17:30 and kind of made his way to John Cena that way.
17:32 You're running the zigzag pattern.
17:34 All he has to do is anticipate where you're going to be next,
17:38 and he ambushes you and he shoots you right then and there.
17:40 So no, that's not accurate at all as far as how that could have been done.
17:44 [gunshot]
17:47 [screaming]
17:49 It's hard to identify a sniper in a setting like this, especially if he's trained.
17:53 He's just going to lay down.
17:55 He can be a thousand meters away.
17:57 You're not finding him.
17:59 So you either get air support overhead or you just spray the area with rounds and hope for the best.
18:08 But there really isn't a good way to identify a sniper from the road, especially if he's that far away.
18:16 Once he shoots, you'll see dust kick off if he's not properly concealed.
18:21 As soldiers, they teach us self-aid, meaning if I get hit in the leg, it's my job to take care of this wound.
18:30 So that's what he should have been doing.
18:32 Instead of flawling on the ground all dramatic, he should have went to work and dressed his wound.
18:38 There's a Humvee right there, so he could have crawled to that Humvee out of sight, out of mind of that sniper.
18:44 There's absolutely no reason why his buddy had to make the mad dash.
18:49 I would rate this a four out of ten.
18:52 None of it made sense to me at all.
18:54 [Gunfire]
19:00 So this clip depicts the Battle of Nazaria when the United States Marines were pushing north towards Baghdad and they got ambushed.
19:08 And this is significant because it ended up turning into a two weeks long engagement with the insurgents.
19:15 Fighting along the river banks in Iraq is something that happened a lot.
19:19 Some of the advantage would be just cover, right, because you have all the vegetation there.
19:25 So you're able to mask yourself from enemy fire a lot better.
19:29 But you also got to figure, too, whatever advantages we have, they also have because they also have cover on the other side.
19:35 Right. The one thing they didn't have were those Humvees with 50 cows on top of them
19:41 and the gunners being able to see above that vegetation.
19:45 So part of what we would do as guys conducting rock clearances, we would search for what we call weapons cache.
19:53 Weapons cache means we're looking for weapons that have been buried.
19:59 What they do is they take all the weapons and all the munitions that they have and they go bury them.
20:04 So what we would then do as engineers is we would pull out our mine detectors and we would go look for them
20:10 and they always like burying them around the riverbed.
20:14 So when we would go dig them up, they would engage us from across the river.
20:17 [engine noise]
20:20 [male speaker] Old battalion's two clicks east of us on the other side of the Gharaf Canal.
20:23 It is possible for a company to take a wrong turn and get lost in Iraq.
20:27 You got to keep in mind that we don't know the terrain.
20:29 We have what's called blue force trackers.
20:32 That's the screen that he was looking at and it's supposed to tell you where on the map you are.
20:37 And those things break a lot.
20:39 It happened to a convoy that I was in.
20:41 We were able to call ahead and let the element know that, hey, we got separated.
20:46 We need you guys to stop until we're able to catch up.
20:49 And they did just that.
20:50 They hate American air.
20:52 I said we call in some air. Some cobras f--- them up.
20:55 There is no air.
20:56 They seem to distrust this particular interpreter because he is not just translating.
21:02 He's also inputting his two cents into what the soldier should be doing.
21:07 And that's not what he's there for.
21:09 He's there to just relay the message coming from us as soldiers to the local population.
21:15 I would rate this scene from Generation Kill a 9 out of 10.
21:22 What they should have done immediately was get into those buildings and get on the rooftops
21:33 because that's where the fight is being fought.
21:36 Saddam staying in the corridor right there gives the insurgency fire superiority.
21:41 And they're just fishing a bucket, essentially, right, just firing down on them.
21:45 I was in Tikrit from 2007 to 2008.
21:49 That's when I spent my 15-month deployment.
21:51 And the city is correctly depicted here with the tight corridors, the rooftops,
21:57 and every day was a battle in that place.
22:00 It took some really heavy fighting to finally get that place under control.
22:04 It was Saddam's hometown, so the folks there were a lot more loyal to Saddam.
22:11 That intensified the firefights that would take place in that town.
22:15 They did not want to go down easy.
22:19 So that's what made it very different in my eyes.
22:22 So in situations where Humvees get blown up, unless they're all gone,
22:32 then we'll just, you know, hunker down and call for support from base camp
22:37 because we can't just leave them on the side of the road.
22:40 We can't take off on foot because now we're leaving government equipment behind
22:44 and we're running from the enemy, and we just don't do that.
22:47 [Shouting]
22:52 We had a guy run into a building by himself with no battle buddy with him to cover his back.
22:58 It takes two people to properly clear a room.
23:01 As soon as I go left, my buddy needs to go right
23:04 because if I go left and nobody goes right,
23:07 who's to say that's not a guy right there to shoot me in the back?
23:09 I would rate this a 5 out of 10.
23:12 The tactics used in this clip didn't make any sense.
23:15 My favorite clip that I watched today was from Billy Lynn,
23:18 and it's because of the rooftop firefight and how accurate it was.
23:23 [Music]