Is It OK To Commemorate One Of Iraq's Bloodiest Battles In A Video Game?

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Six Days In Fallujah is based on the fight between U.S. troops and Iraqi opposition forces in 2004. The project was shelved for a decade, but the creator says it offers a serious look at the battle.

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Can a civilian understand what it means to be in combat? Can a video game even come close to portraying that experience? The controversial new game Six Days In Fallujah attempts to do that. And as the so-called forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan come to an end, NPR's Quil Lawrence reports some worry that this will trivialize the battle. And a warning - this story includes the sound of gunfire.

QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: Combat and storytelling are two very different skills. Elliot Ackerman has both. He's a decorated veteran and a novelist. He fought in the second battle of Fallujah in 2004, the biggest battle of the Iraq War. Ackerman's platoon got out ahead of the front line.

ELLIOT ACKERMAN: We go even deeper into the city than we'd planned.

LAWRENCE: They didn't want to turn back, so they hide in an empty building.

ACKERMAN: And that building wound up being, like, a convenience store. We call it the candy store.

LAWRENCE: They're low on food, so they pig out on warm Coca-Cola and Pringles. It doesn't take long for the insurgents to figure out where Ackerman's men are. The Marines pop smoke grenades for cover.

ACKERMAN: You're standing in this, like, cloud of, you know, purple and yellow smoke. And you can hear the bullet snaps through the smoke because the insurgents see the smoke. And they can't see you, but they're shooting at the smoke.

LAWRENCE: By dawn, they're surrounded, trapped in the store. Two men are down, and the medics have them.

ACKERMAN: And I go and I kind of, like, stick my head out the door just to, like, see like, can we get out this way? And there is a RPK, which is, like, a light machine, and it just goes - gah (ph) - like that right down the alleyway, like, soon as I poked my head out. And I bump into Banotai. He was one of the squad leaders. And I remember I looked at him, and I was like, it's suicide if we go out that way. I just kind of blurted that out to him. And he later told me, it's like, you know, the time I was the most afraid was when you said that to me.

LAWRENCE: That kind of fear and adrenaline, how the Marines escape the candy store, it's something only they experienced. But Ackerman rejects the idea that civilians can't possibly relate.

ACKERMAN: You know, you ever been involved something tragic? Ever been in a car accident, crisis? It's the same thing, totally the same thing.

LAWRENCE: Most people know trauma or loss. This past year, it seems global. Ackerman says both civilians and veterans have to try harder.

ACKERMAN: So I think that to say, I can't imagine it, is a cop-out. It's basically telling a whole group of people, meaning veterans, that they can never come home.

LAWRENCE: Because home is mostly just feeling understood, feeling at home. So how do you build that understanding about the past 20 years of war? Plenty of novels and essays and movies have tried.

PETER TAMTE: I got a phone call...

LAWRENCE: And there are less traditional ways...

TAMTE: ...Or email, actually...

LAWRENCE: ...Like what Peter Tamte does.

TAMTE: ...At first from a Marine who I'd gotten to know quite well who had been medevaced out of the battle for Fallujah. And he started telling me all these stories from the battle that I had not heard.

LAWRENCE: Tamte is not a Marine, never served. He got to know a lot of Marines, though, when he was designing video training simulations for the military. One of those Marines called him back in 2004 straight from Fallujah.

TAMTE: I was blown away by the things that he had said. And it was that conversation where he said, you know, Peter, our generation plays video games.

LAWRENCE: He says, we don't read books or even watch movies so much. We play video games.

TAMTE: I was like, yeah, I know. He said, would you be interested in creating a video game to tell the stories of the battle for Fallujah? And so - and I - immediately, I said yes. And I didn't really understand fully what I was getting myself into.

LAWRENCE: Tamte called it Six Days In Fallujah, based on scenarios the Marines told him about. Then he spent the next five years working on it. The game included interviews with Americans but also Iraqis, documentary-style. While most of the civilians had left Fallujah, there were some stuck there during the battle. Tamte says American troops know what they did taking that city.

TAMTE: One of the Marines articulated it. He said, you know, what happened to the people of Fallujah is tragic. It's tragic. And it wasn't their fault. They said at the same time, not my fault either.

(SOUNDBITE OF GUNFIRE)

LAWRENCE: This is a firefight I watched in Fallujah. Insurgents fired RPGs and mortars. Americans took out buildings with airstrikes.

(SOUNDBITE OF GUNFIRE)

LAWRENCE: Five years later, in 2009, Konami, one of the world's largest video game makers, had partnered with Tamte's company and was going to release the game. But the Iraq War was still raging. Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians had died. Fallujah was still a combat zone.

KEREN MEREDITH: This war is going on, and it's not a game.

LAWRENCE: Keren Meredith lost her son, Ken Ballard, in Iraq.

MEREDITH: Ken never got the chance to put another quarter in and play another game. And I just didn't think that it was right - the armchair warriors, the keyboard warriors who were so, you know, let's play a game. Oops, I got killed. OK, let's start over.

LAWRENCE: After outraged Gold Star mothers got on cable news, the big corporate sponsor, Konami, just dumped the game.

TAMTE: Well, you know, honestly, I was crushed initially.

LAWRENCE: Peter Tamte says he'd been consumed by the project. And suddenly, no one would touch it.

TAMTE: I thought that somehow, someway, I cannot walk away from the trust that these Marine soldiers and Iraqis at that point had given us to tell their stories.

LAWRENCE: Tamte put the stories away on hard drives.

TAMTE: I made a couple of backups, and I put them in safe deposit boxes.

LAWRENCE: And that's where they sat for most of the decade. Tamte left the video game business altogether. Then this past February, he reached out - actually, his publicist did - with a trailer. They're making the game.