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” In “A Company of Soldiers,” Frontline reports from inside the U.S. Army’s 8th Cavalry Regiment stationed in Baghdad for an up-close, intimate look at the dangers facing an American military unit in Iraq. Shot in the weeks following the U.S. presidential election, the film tracks the day-to-day challenges facing the 8th Cavalry’s Dog Company as it suddenly has to cope with a dramatic increase in attacks by insurgents.”

Atkinson actually learned he’d won the 2003 Pulitzer for An Army at Dawn, his history of the World War II North African campaign, while he was eating dust in the push toward Baghdad. So you’d expect this new volume, In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat, would be the most intimate, vivid and well-informed account yet published of those major combat operations that President Bush declared at an end on May 1. And it is.”

This documentary focus on the experiences of a small group of soldiers inevitably led to comparisons with Michael Tucker’s Gunner Palace, with both films raising, both consciously and unconsciously, questions about the representations of war.This is the story of any and every war; of every soldier’s anxieties, frustrations, endurance, and even their small joys. Embedded along-side a remarkable group of soldiers for two months, Pulitzer Prize-winner and bestselling author Rick Atkinson had the extraordinary opportunity to get inside one of the most storied combat units in the U.S. Army, the 101st Airborne Division -– the original “band of brothers.” In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat is his first-person account from the Iraqi battlefield, and an intimate, fresh view of our modern soldiers in action.

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