Search - War in the Gulf on DVD

Not Much of a Documentary

CrustyOldSarge | Illinois | 08/14/2008

(2 out of 5 stars)

"I'm a 22 year U.S. Army veteran and served in the Gulf War (Desert Shield/Storm). I was looking for a good well rounded documentary about the events that had influenced my life in 1990/1991. This was not it.
It's an eight disc set, but five of the discs are just about worthless. They are mostly about weapons systems (at test and firing ranges), some not even used in Desert Storm. They are more a like a defense contractors introductory film for a new product some nations armed forces had just acquired. There is even footage from a big arms fair years after Desert Storm. The lame background music, and sound quality on all the discs reminded me of army training films from the 80's. Crisp and clear video is one of the few good points.
Two of the discs I did like. So, it's not all entirely bad. One disc had a good account of the 100 hour ground war with decent footage, and a very detailed account with good film footage on the 36 hour battle for Kahfji, which occured in late January 1991. The other disc was devoted to the air war and had good but over used stock footage. The third disc was just basically the two (ground and air) combined and condensed.
The story is told entirely from a coalition point of view. It never goes into the reasons for Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, or the political manuevering prior to January 17, 1991 to get Saddam to leave peacefully. The war footage narration has an overly heavy "RAH!!, RAH!!!, Hooray for ourside!!!" tone to it.
Unless you are a military hardware buff leave this alone.
As a Gulf War veteran I was pretty much dissatisfied."