I can't recommend Sinai Field Mission as a documentary. It is a video log of U.S. and U.N. efforts to build confidence in a treaty between Egypt and Israel. Emphasis on video log, there are scenes of driving around the desert, office parties, people drinking alcohol out of a boot and singing about Texas, people exercising, office life, and fleeting glimpses of diplomatic wrangling.
It could have easily been cut to a short and even then probably wouldn't be an award winning one. Aside from being in dire need of tighter direction, let alone editing, it would have also benefited substantially from a trick used in the documentary Restrepo: regularly label the personnel when they appear on screen. Following the workings of the office is all the harder when you don't know which organization people are working for. Interviews are also a standard practice for good reason when making this kind of movie. All that said, Director Fredrick Wiseman's intent seems to be to provide an almost anthropological accounting of the full range of the American experience which is a rather different set of criteria than the one I'm using.
Nonetheless, there are some interesting bits of history:
- There was a buffer zone in the Sinai that was strictly controlled by the U.N. There were then adjacent buffer zones with no tanks and an third zone with no missiles allowed. Each side also had an observation post which was limited to 250 people each who could not carry heavy weapons. Each side also got two reconnaissance flights a day.
- The U.S. had a specific submission, the Sinai Field Mission (SFM), that used an electronic sensor system to monitor movement across the most strategically valuable staging area in the dessert. This apparently had been somewhat unprecedented as it was a standalone single country command rather being under the U.N. The U.S. government side of this had been run by the State Department in cooperation with USAID and USIS.
- Surprisingly for the period, the vast majority of workers in the SFM were contractors with a company called E-Systems. I think I may have been wrong to have been surprised, I think overseas civilian agencies have been dependent on contractors for far longer than the military.
- What didn't surprise me at all was that there were certain tensions within the mission. I don't think this is necessarily a reflection of the U.S. government-contractor divide, turf battles show up with any medium sized organization. If anything I was surprised that there weren't more tensions with the U.N. Peacekeepers as they often used SFM facilities and I think the vast majority of them didn't speak English.
- The occasional diplomatic were trifling. Some complaints about a strict cut off for the last patrol of the day and some excitement regarding a medical evacuation by helicopter.
All that said there were a few paeans to the SFM staff and the U.N. Peacekeepers and I'd say they were earned. They helped keep the peace in an often dull unromantic mission 7,000 miles from their home. (The mile count comes from a song performed by one of the mission leaders, presumably written by him too.)
Picture of Sinai Desert by Sonysan used under a creative commons license.
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