When you join the British army you're given (or used to be given) a document in a brown waterproof jacket called a pay book. Beginning with your name and number, it was part identity card, part record of your pay, part documentation of your shooting skills. This latter section was preceded by the statement: "Your Weapons Are Given to You to Kill the Enemy." I was reminded of this conjunction of a surrendered identity, the receipt of money and the implied licence to kill while watching Armadillo, a remarkable documentary directed by the Danish film-maker Janus Metz, and photographed with an astonishing mixture of lyricism, acute observation and gut-wrenching immediacy by Lars Skree. Both were embedded for six months in 2009 with a Danish infantry company operating in the Nato-led Isaf (International Security Assistance Force) at a forward operating base called Armadillo in the Helmand province of Afghanistan.
Seven years ago, Susanne Bier, the Danish director who won a best foreign language film Oscar this year for In a Better World, examined Denmark's military involvement in Afghanistan in her thoughtful movie Brothers. But it had little of the impact or immediacy of Armadillo, a cinema verite film that eschews commentary, interviews or statements direct to camera and is much like another highly regarded documentary, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's Restrepo. That also followed an infantry unit at a remote base, in that case in the mountainous Korengal Valley area.
Armadillo begins with the soldiers in their regimental depot being given a final address by an unseen senior officer who tells them that the government has determined national policy and it is their duty to implement it. There follows an introduction to key members of the unit, among them the sweet-faced adolescent Mads and the platoon's cheerful Asian medic, Kim; a farewell party with entertainment by a stripper; parting from family and friends at the airport; and a lengthy flight with them all stretched out in rows in a military transport plane.
Settling into their dusty new camp, they're told their job is to befriend the locals whom they're protecting from the Taliban: "Keep things you don't want from your ration packs and give them to the village kids." In this place, "Green Zone" doesn't mean a protective haven, as it does in Baghdad, but the Taliban-dominated terrain outside the Armadillo.
From the start it becomes clear that the locals are deeply distrustful and unco-operative. They regard both the occupying troops and the Taliban as "men with guns" (the title more than incidentally of a John Sayles film about Latin American peons trapped between violent governments and guerrillas). The defining difference is that the soldiers will go away and the Taliban will hang around to cut your throat. The kids, meanwhile, shower the visitors with untranslated insults. An introductory patrol goes badly through poor fieldwork, but soon there's a routine of guard duty, forays into the countryside, the traditional Danish pursuit of watching porn movies and the more recent activity of playing violent video games.
A curious indifference to the locals grows as recently planted fields are trampled, livestock killed by grenades and compensation paid for damaged property. The largely unseen Taliban, nicknamed "ninjas" for the lethal stealth with which they come and go, cannot be distinguished from the nearby villagers, and all are greeted with similar suspicion. Three Danes from another unit are killed by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and a tough, much-respected Danish leader receives serious head injuries and is flown back to Copenhagen for treatment. Oddly, nothing apparently diminishes the martial zeal of the soldiers who, young Mads among them, seem to combine military esprit de corps with a Viking love of combat. Most appear to be war lovers, a type the French call baroudeurs.
In the movie's crucial episode, which aroused a continuing controversy in Denmark after its premiere at Cannes last May, a volunteer night patrol blacks up and goes out to confront the Taliban. Shortly after dawn, in a brilliantly shot and edited sequence, civilians flee the village, the enemy is located in a ditch and destroyed and an air strike brought in. It is, on the face of it, a successful mission. However, we see a grenade lobbed into a ditch, and five injured Taliban are killed off in, as one of the soldiers later says, "the most humane way possible". Was this a war crime? Or were they protecting themselves from a crafty foe? Did they seem to be enjoying it? Should there have been more handwringing? This is Rashomon military style disturbingly set out before us. However, medals were presented, no one was charged and most of the troops involved subsequently volunteered for another tour of duty in Afghanistan.
It took great courage for Janus Metz and Lars Skree to make Armadillo – first to shoot it under such conditions and then to present the material in this non-judgmental manner. The audience is confronted with a genuine moral challenge, both by the issues raised by the killing of the Taliban and in the way we look at the war in Afghanistan itself, still raging after nearly a decade.The film's final images resonate – first a non-triumphalist march through the streets back home, the warriors led by two comrades in wheelchairs, and then a weary soldier, bearded and tattooed, getting into a shower to cleanse himself of memories that are, one infers, as indelible as the tattoos that cover his arms.
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