New role for ex-Marine [Actor in "Battle for Haditha" film]

At just age 26, Andrew McLaren has already had many roles in his life - soldier, bodyguard, playboy and, most recently, family man and political candidate.

He's starring in "Battle for Haditha," a film scheduled for release in January. It is based on allegations that Marines killed 24 Iraqis - including women and children - during a 2005 rampage in that Iraqi city.

"I kind of wanted to live a full life and do whatever I wanted to do," McLaren said recently about his rather unique résumé.

For McLaren, a former model, this is his first major role in a film, and his experience in the military helped him land the part.

"He had some combat experience in Iraq, and he and the other guys that were in the military give it a little credence as far as reality is concerned," said Gordon McLaren, Andrew's father and a Vietnam War veteran. "They've all been there. They've all seen it."

Andrew McLaren was a Marine for several years, which included a 2003 mission to Liberia to guard the U.S. Embassy during that country's civil war. He also served in Iraq, hunting for improvised explosive devices on the streets of Baghdad and helping to train members of the Iraqi army.

For his service, he received the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal and the Humanitarian Service Medal, according to his honorable discharge papers.

McLaren returned from Iraq in 2005, but he soon went back to the war zone as an employee of the Blackwater USA private security firm. He said he earned top dollar guarding senators and Bush administration officials and even the president on one occasion.

The work of contractors like Blackwater has sparked controversy over the role of the private sector in war zones, with some critics charging they're mercenaries whose work exists outside normal legal oversight.

McLaren bristles at any suggestion that Blackwater employees are soldiers for hire. They're highly trained government contractors, he said.

"I was a certified special agent over there. We're not mercenaries," McLaren said. "We have authority from the U.S. government and we go through a strict vetting process."

The job is very dangerous. Part of the work included providing armed escort duty for U.S. officials going outside of Baghdad's relatively secure "Green Zone."

The work is also very lucrative. McLaren said he earned about $200,000 in eight months last year, money that allowed him to return to the U.S. periodically and enjoy a playboy lifestyle in Manhattan, driving around in a Ferrari and Lamborghini he rented. He also outfitted his own Lexus convertible with television sets, a DVD player and new rims.

But there came a time when the money and the job lost their allure, and McLaren wanted to settle back in this country with Melissa Garcia, a model he met at a fashion show in 2004.

"I had this great thing at home waiting for me, so that's why I left that job," McLaren said.

They married in October, about a month after he returned from Iraq. Melissa McLaren recalled recently that when she spoke to Andrew while he was in Iraq, she could sometimes hear mortar shells exploding in the background.

"It was a big ordeal every time I had to hang up the phone with him and not know when I was going to be able to speak to him next," she said "The money wasn't worth it. His life was more important."

McLaren returned to the U.S. in August and the couple moved out to California in September so she could pursue her modeling career and he could try out acting.

One day, McLaren noticed an ad in LA Weekly that said military men were wanted for a movie, but the ad didn't specify what it was about.

McLaren said he and hundreds of other hopefuls auditioned for 12 parts in the film. After several call-backs, he landed the role of Capt. Sampson - who heads a unit of Marines that's struck by a roadside bomb, killing one of them.

McLaren said his character is based loosely on a real-life Marine company commander, Capt. Lucas McConnell, who is facing charges in the incident.

The investigation into what happened at Haditha continues. After the bombing, enraged Marines killed the Iraqis, according to press reports. Several Marines have been brought up on murder charges, and four other officers have been accused of failing to investigate war crime allegations or covering them up, according to press reports.

"Battle for Haditha," filmed in Jordan, is the latest movie from British director Nick Broomfield, whose other films include "Kurt & Courtney," a 1998 documentary about Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain, who took his own life in 1994 at age 27, and his wife, singer Courtney Love. He also made "Biggie and Tupac," a 2002 documentary about the unsolved homicide cases of rap artists Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls.

Broomfield was busy recently with post-production work on "Battle for Haditha" and could not be reached for comment. A trailer from the film was recently shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

The trailer is chilling to watch. After a bomb set up by insurgents blows up a Humvee, a Marine is shown shooting Iraqis who have their hands up.

McLaren said he was initially concerned about how the movie would portray the military. In the end, however, he said it shows what it's like to be in combat and the realities soldiers face during war.

"The movie is told from an equal playing field - from the Iraqis' point of view, the insurgents' point of view and the Marines' point of view," McLaren said. "There's no black or white in this movie, it's all just a (messed) up situation for everybody."

He's also posted comments on an online forum for military service members asking them to keep an open mind about the film.

"We represented the Corps in a positive light. ... We would never sell out our fellow Marines for 15 minutes of fame," McLaren wrote. "This movie is far from liberal propaganda, and is the most accurate portrayal of the War on Terror yet."

During a recent interview, McLaren wore a "Battle for Haditha" T-shirt, which covered a tattoo on his shoulder of the World Trade Center. He also has images of cherry blossoms with skulls in the middle on his right arm. On his left arm is a tattoo of the Marine Corps eagle, globe and anchor symbol.

He and Melissa are expecting a baby in about four months. The couple and their 5-year-old daughter live with McLaren's parents in North Castle. McLaren attended Byram Hills High School for two years and graduated in 1999 from Avon Old Farms School, a private school in Avon, Conn.

McLaren said he hopes the "Battle for Haditha" leads to more roles. If he can't pursue an acting career, he has a backup plan. He's attending the New York City Police Academy next month.

He's also planning to run for a seat on the North Castle Town Board under the banner of the Veterans for Improvement Party. McLaren, who describes himself as a moderate Republican, acknowledges the odds of him winning a seat are daunting, but said he views the post as another chance to serve his country.

More on the director;

Director Nick Broomfield on 'Battle for Haditha' Dave Calhoun talks to Nick Broomfield about a tragedy in Iraq and why his new film will highlight the plight of America’s marines as much as Iraqi civilians

Nick Broomfield puzzles over the direction of his new Iraq drama, on set in rural Jordan (image © Phil Fisk) Nick Broomfield is talking from Jordan on a weather-beaten mobile-phone line at the end of a tough day’s shooting in a remote village about an hour’s drive from the country’s capital, Amman. A few hours earlier, the British director best known for his popular documentaries such as ‘Kurt and Courtney’ and ‘Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer’ was shooting a scene for a new film – a drama – in which a group of Iraqi women in the town of Haditha grieve over the deaths of their husbands and sons at the hands of US marines. This may not be a documentary, Broomfield explains, but the scene was still a grim one to capture. Most of the actors were Iraqis who now live in Jordan and have experienced such loss themselves. To keep it real, Broomfield shot the scene in a single, 40-minute take. It would have been impossible to do anything else, he reasons. How could you recreate those same emotions a second time round?

‘I knew it was going to be hard-going and I had to get amazing performances out of them,’ Broomfield continues. He gathered the male actors in one room with their relatives’ bodies lying on the floor shrouded in white sheets and gathered the women in a room next door, as is customary for Iraqi funerals. ‘There was this one woman who had herself lost a son – he was literally shot on her doorstep in front of her husband – and she offered to lead the grieving. The women danced and sung and beat their chests and tore their clothes. She started this, and within 20 minutes every single woman was in tears, beating their faces. They’d all been through these experiences.’

Broomfield’s new film is ‘Battle for Haditha’, which he has been filming in Jordan since the beginning of March. Controversial as ever, it’s a dramatisation of the events which led to 24 Iraqi civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha being shot dead by US Marines on November 19 2005. Exactly what happened in this small town 150 miles to the north-west of Baghdad is still emerging 18 months later. What’s for sure is that a roadside bomb, planted by insurgents, exploded in the town on the morning of the 19th, killing 20-year-old Lance Corp Miguel (‘TJ’) Terrazas, who was driving a Humvee in a convoy of four. An initial US military statement stated simply but outrageously that 15 Iraqi civilians also died from the blast of the bomb and that eight additional Iraqi insurgents were killed during an immediate gunfight with US soldiers. But a very different version of these events came into play when an amateur video, shot the day after the deaths, was passed to an Iraqi human-rights organisation and, in turn, Time magazine at the beginning of 2006. This film clearly showed the bodies of women and children who had been shot in their homes. When questioned, Iraqi eyewitnesses suggested that US soldiers had gone on an armed rampage in the town in revenge for their colleague’s death and that was how most of the 24 Iraqi civilians had died – at least six of them children aged between two and 14. Subsequently, the US army launched a criminal investigation last March, several officers have resigned, and four marines are now on trial facing charges of unpremeditated murder.

And so Broomfield is again reconstructing the context to a calamity, following on directly from his last film, ‘Ghosts’, for which he recreated the events leading to the deaths of 23 Chinese cockle-pickers in Morecambe Bay in February 2004 (and which screened on TV last month). Both that film and ‘Battle for Haditha’ were commissioned by Channel 4’s digital sister channel, More4, and again Broomfield is applying devised drama to current affairs, this time filming in Jordan as a stand-in for Iraq, which is still too volatile. Starting last June, Broomfield and producer Anna Telford made several research trips to Jordan (‘We didn’t go to Haditha itself, it was too dangerous’) and held long conversations with ‘five or six people from the town, all of whom were there on the day and knew the people who were killed’. They travelled to the US several times too, initially to meet the mother of a marine who was a close friend of ‘TJ’, the marine killed by the roadside bomb. ‘She arranged for us to meet a couple of other marines who were there on the day. They were clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress and were in a very bad way. A lot of these chaps had been through Fallujah, in a hardcore unit. It took them a long time to open up.’

What Broomfield found during these discussions was that his Iraqi sources and his informers in the marines told the same story: that the marines killed indiscriminately in Haditha as a knee-jerk reaction to their colleague’s death. ‘The story was pretty much the same, there was confusion as to the exact time order, but basically it was the same.’ From the marines’ conversations, Broomfield concluded that ‘their standard operating procedure rules are so *ucking hardcore. If, for example, a house is described as “hostile”, then you just kill everyone in the house. It doesn’t matter if it contains two-year-olds or the elderly, which is what they did in Fallujah – where these guys had come from.

‘But the deeper I dug into the whole story, the harder I realised it was to take a side,’ Broomfield considers, admitting that ‘at first his story was much more judgmental against the marines.

‘I realised that these soldiers were very, very poor kids, who had all left school unbelievably early. It was the first time they had all been out of the United States. They didn’t speak a word of Iraqi. They had no idea what they were doing in Iraq, and they felt let down by the marine corps. It was hard to condemn them out of hand as cold-blooded killers.’

Broomfield is using a handful of professional actors, both American and Iraqi, but his cast is mostly amateur: ex-marines, or at least ex-soldiers, and Iraqi civilians he has persuaded to lend their lives to the film. That said, he doesn’t name specific names of marines who served in Haditha, despite taking a strictly journalistic approach to the film’s plotting and basing events on his research and conversations with those who intimately understand his characters’ culture, whether Iraqis or marines.

One reason for not pointing the finger at individual marines is that the trial of the four already accused of murder is ongoing. Another is that he doesn’t see Haditha as an isolated case but rather a symbol of a wider crisis.

‘I think there have been lots of Hadithas, and there are lots of Hadithas every year,’ he reasons. ‘The difference with this event is that the aftermath just happened to be filmed and now there’s an inquiry. It’s much more convenient for the US government and the marine corps to make scapegoats of these guys than actually deal with its policy and rules of engagement in Iraq. I’m sure it happens on a lesser scale every single day.’

‘Battle for Haditha’ will screen in London and on More4 later in the year.

Same link as trailer in post 21

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