IT'S BEEN A few decades since the sitcom soldier and his laugh track parted ways. Gomer Pyle, Colonel Klink, and Corporal Klinger are comfortably composting in the archives as the fires of war-hell burn hotter. In times of actual war, satire (sorry, Team America: World Police) has to be carefully rationed. The Mayberry-naive soldier's been squeezed out in the good-versus-evil master narrative. One day our new soldier archetype is saving Private Lynch on Fox News, the next s/he's molesting another detainee in the pages of the New York Times.

Still, it could be argued that the United States is itself a kind of sitcom, one that jumped the shark when it created the policy of preemptive engagement. How else to explain the giant U.S. military truck audiotaped for Gunner Palace, a new war documentary, ripping a page from Apocalypse Now by broadcasting Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" on its supposedly peace-making rounds through newly liberated Iraq?

Filmmaker Michael Tucker spent two months with the 2-3 Field Artillery in Baghdad making his own war movie – and it's peopled with soldiers whose minds were clearly fertilized in the fields of pop culture. Forget the mock M*A*S*H scenes poolside at the wrecked palace of Uday Hussein. The new Army of this movie is epitomized by a guy named Wilf who's seemingly making his Real World: Baghdad debut with a mop-head-bedsheet-sheikh shtick and a Jimi Hendrix-styled "Star Spangled Banner." Tucker remixes the work of Wilf and comrades into a new anthem of Army life in this very weird war – throwing Rummy's cheesy cheerleading on American Forces Radio up next to Islamic calls to prayer, the strange soundtracks of psyops vehicles, and the rapid-fire, impromptu raps the many African American Army "volunteers" offer up for the camera. Spc. Richmond Shaw breaks the fourth wall as he lays it out in verse: "For y'all, this is just a show, but we live in this movie."

For a doc, the setting of Gunner Palace is strangely Hollywood back lot, Cecil B. DeMille era. The unit is stationed in Hussein's aforementioned bombed-yet-still-baroque palace, where legend had it that men were fed to lions, and reporters picked through party receipts and STD tests left behind by the high life-lovin' eldest son of Saddam. Now, Uday's pool's been cleaned, a putting green's been set up, and, at one point, the DJ spins tunes for a party called Gunnerpalooza. Later, we learn, no swimming will be allowed: the pool's become a bombing target.

It's no surprise that gallows humor is the going style among soldiers; some are doubled over, rolling on the ground laughing, as they listen to one describe the new "armor" on their cars: just enough, he says, to slow down the shrapnel so it lodges inside the body instead of passing straight through. But the narrator of the film, whose diary this actually is, gives them away. The velvet-voiced Tucker, who once was a military recruiter, fills in the awkward silences with fatalistic summaries of the days' events. Soldiers scurry in a room chasing a rat as the narrator notes mortars have just dropped a hundred yards away. The filmmaker himself is caught in a hailstorm of bullets early on in his stay. But he's told the death trap he just evaded is now termed "minor combat" – since George W. Bush was deposited on that aircraft carrier to declare the end of "major combat."

Unlike that of blustery war blockbusters, the film's awful suspense is earned. And Tucker makes the high-stakes environment vivid and excruciating. Scanning Baghdad with night-vision lights from within military vehicles like it's the underwater world of Jacques Cousteau, he sees gunfire reds glow eerily against dark blue skies. Daytime brings deadly stagnancy, like a sandstorm dusting over the turquoise palace pool. Often, as a scene wraps, Tucker freezes the frame just for that extra existential pause. He's most engaged in filming soldiers doing their jobs – work that includes visiting an orphanage, picking up a glue-sniffing adolescent, wheat-pasting posters to telephone polls, as well as raiding private homes, sometimes based on questionable intelligence, to find bomb builders. One Iraqi man being hog-tied says he's a reporter and his brother is a hospital tech. He's brutally told by some of those same nice soldiers to "shut up" and soon taken to Abu Ghraib, where I'm sure he still remains.

If it's high contrast to the happy-go-lucky high jinks inside the palace, we all understand that the script for this war has always been noir. In personal interviews with many of the soldiers, Tucker captures them occasionally dropping their game faces, questioning their roles, counting their days. They realize the difference between war, the movie, and war as they're living it. They seem to be desperately hoping that, at some point, we will too.

'Gunner Palace' opens Fri/4 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock for show times.