The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara's immensely popular novel of the Civil War, recounts the Battle of Gettysburg from the point of view of those who fought there, artfully blending history and imagination. On the Union side, Shaara tells his story chiefly through the eyes of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, commander of the 20th Maine Volunteers, who actually won the Medal of Honor defending Little Round Top.

At the outset of the narrative, Shaara's protagonist finds himself facing a delicate leadership challenge far removed from combat. On the eve of battle, the high command has saddled Chamberlain with 120 mutineers, the remnants of another Maine regiment whose members have seen enough of war. His orders are to make the mutineers fight--and to shoot them if they refuse. A citizen-soldier himself, Chamberlain understands the futility of attempting to browbeat or coerce volunteers. Moreover, he cannot conceive of ordering his own troops to turn their guns on men from their home state. So rather than making threats, Chamberlain decides on a riskier course: employing the plain, unadorned idiom of American idealism, he simply reminds the disgruntled mutineers of the Cause for which they first took up arms, asking them on that basis to set aside their grievances and join his regiment.

"This is a different kind of army", Chamberlain tells them.

"If you look at history you'll see men fight for pay, or women, or some other kind of loot. They fight for land, or because a king makes them, or just because they like killing. But we're here for something new. . . . We're an army going out to set other men free."

It is a masterful performance. Moreover, nothing about that performance is contrived or false. When Chamberlain stipulates freedom as the peculiarly American purpose for which the Union Army fights, we know that he speaks with conviction: the speech works. The mutineers join his own battle-depleted ranks, providing the essential increment of fighting power that enables Chamberlain's regiment to hold Little Round Top, the action on which victory at Gettysburg, and arguably the entire war, turns.

This belief that Americans at war constitute--or at least ought to constitute--"a different kind of army" exercises a powerful hold on the national consciousness. But there is more at work in this belief than mere patriotic pride. The insistence that Americans fight "to set other men free" has helped to validate the nation's transformation from a republic of modest means and ambitions into a military superpower with interests spanning the globe. In the aftermath of the Cold War, as the use of force by the United States has become increasingly commonplace, reaffirming the historical uniqueness of the American soldier has taken on renewed importance. Assuring ourselves that our troops fight not for land or booty or because they are ordered to do so, but as conscious agents of liberation sustains the ancient claim that we are ourselves unique, both as people and nation.

Indeed, among devotees of U.S. global primacy--a group currently including just about everybody to the right of Noam Chomsky and to the left of Patrick Buchanan--merely to suggest that the American soldier might not be so different after all is to provoke outrage. The heated criticism evoked in some quarters by Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg's moving tribute to the generation that fought World War II, offers a case in point. That Captain John Miller and his Rangers were remarkably good at killing Germans was, in the eyes of these critics, not good enough. However brave and resolute they may have been, however great the sacrifices they rendered, Spielberg's GIs flunked the litmus test of ideology. They manifested little appreciation of Nazism as a threat to liberty. They seemed oblivious to the fate of those imprisoned in Hitler's death camps. They just did as they were told, hoping that by saving Ryan, they might earn their passage home.

Now another filmmaker has entered the fray. Three Kings, David Russell's consciously revisionist interpretation of the Persian Gulf War, begins where standard accounts of that conflict leave off--after Desert Storm. This shrewdly chosen vantage point permits Russell to disregard the war's origins in favor of its uglier consequences, and to ignore the crimes that Iraq perpetrated while focusing on the punishment that Iraqis themselves endured.

Three Kings is above all a barbed rebuke directed at President George Bush, whom Russell indicts for being either morally obtuse or coldly cynical. Russell's main gripe is that Bush called off the war too soon. Although he framed the crusade against Saddam Hussein as a moral imperative, Bush halted U.S. forces as soon as they had secured the loot (in the form of Persian Gulf oil), ignoring the claims of freedom advanced by Iraqis eager to throw off their shackles. While a mighty American army sat preening itself on its success, Saddam brutally and methodically crushed this uprising. Rather than fulfilling their historic responsibility to serve as agents of freedom, American soldiers, through their inaction, became complicit in its destruction.

To recast the war in these terms, Russell must bring American soldiers face to face with the Iraqis whom he accuses the United States of forsaking. The story that he concocts to arrange that confrontation is, in many respects, a preposterous one. Immediately following the ceasefire, three young GIs, reservists assigned to a civil affairs unit, recover a map from an Iraqi prisoner of war. The map purports to show the location of Kuwaiti bullion looted by Saddam's army and now stashed in Iraq, well beyond the area occupied by coalition forces. Disappointed at having missed out on the "action", disoriented by their surreal surroundings (they struggle to distinguish between "our ragheads" and "their ragheads"), the three GIs hatch a scheme to enjoy at least one bona fide adventure before going home. They will re-enact Desert Storm in miniature, making their own dash across the desert to relieve Saddam of his ill-gotten gold. Joining them and masterminding the expedition is one Major Archie Gates (George Clooney). A hard-bitten professional, Gates spent his war servicing the media's voracious needs, occasionally even providing information. On the eve of retirement, he intends to leave the Persian Gulf with a nice nest egg to ease his transition to civilian life.

So Gates and his three cronies commandeer a Humvee and set out. Picking their way through the detritus of conquest--luxury cars and Rolexes, color TVs and stereos, Cuisinarts and cell phones--they get their hands on the bullion with remarkable ease. Yet in doing so they become enmeshed in the bloody struggle between Saddam's Republican Guard and a group of Iraqi dissidents, with whom, reluctantly, they make common cause.

Various misadventures ensue, some comic and macabre, others harrowing and horrific. One of the four Americans is killed. A second undergoes gruesome torture. Pursued by both Saddam's henchmen and their own highly incensed commanders, the three survivors are eventually cornered and confront their moment of truth: they must choose between treasure for themselves and freedom for others. Their understanding of the war's true meaning now transformed, they forfeit the gold to ransom several dozen erstwhile victims of Saddam's wrath who slip across the border to safety.

The implication is clear: if a handful of errant GIs could accomplish this much, then General Schwarzkopf's idle legions could--and should--have saved many more. Rather than merely restoring the independence of one country (Kuwait) and preserving the independence of another (Saudi Arabia), both of which rank among the world's least likeable, the U.S. military would then have kept faith with its time-honored tradition of expanding the realm of freedom.

It is a heartening proposition. Yet it is one that Russell's own story line cannot sustain. The sanctuary to which the dissidents escape is not America, nor even Kuwait, but Iran. No doubt survival in the Islamic Republic is preferable to death at the hands of Saddam's goons, but it hardly qualifies as freedom. Moreover, the conversion of Russell's three surviving heroes proves to be a temporary affair. The end of the movie finds the former Major Gates not crusading for human rights, but happily cashing in on his military skills as a technical adviser in Hollywood.

The expedition on which Gates embarked with his young comrades is an adolescent fantasy of war. Like scrubs who sat out the big game, they hankered for the chance to sprint out onto the field even if the final gun has sounded, the crowds departed, and the varsity has gone to the showers. It is hardly surprising that such an enterprise should go awry.

For all of his film's apparent realism and candid acknowledgment of war's brutality, David Russell attempts to foist onto the viewer his own fantasy. Back in Washington, politicians and generals may conspire to conceal or disregard moral considerations, he seems to suggest, but the common soldier in the field retains the capacity to discern truth and to act accordingly. Even if our system of governance appears irredeemably compromised, Russell implies, the conscience of the American soldier may yet prevent the United States from sinking to the depths of ignobility that marked every other empire that has held sway across the globe. Indeed, as the last reservoir of American idealism, he may yet permit the United States to use its vast military power to do good works.

A more fundamental misunderstanding of the reality of war can scarcely be imagined. Any soldier thrust into war views events through a thick shroud of moral ambiguity. Combat does not instill clarity of vision. Rather, it tests the capacity of individuals to maintain even the most rudimentary distinction between good and evil. Too frequently, that distinction is lost altogether, with tragic consequences. Incidents such as My Lai or the recently revealed massacre at No Gun Ri make the point that Americans are not exempt from this phenomenon.

Yet there is no need even to look back as far as Korea or Vietnam. The years since Desert Storm provide an abundance of examples suggesting that resorting to force, however worthy the motivation, leads to moral complications that soldiers are ill-equipped to resolve. In Somalia, troops sent to feed the starving ended up gunning down women and children in gun battles in the streets of Mogadishu. In Kosovo, NATO pilots, failing to halt the depredations of a Yugoslav Army engaged in ethnic cleansing, resorted instead to hammering Belgrade. For months on end, in the skies over Iraq, American airmen have been conducting an air campaign that kills and injures Iraqis for no conceivable purpose.

However much David Russell might wish otherwise, it is not the job of soldiers to untangle the moral snares inherent in these conflicts. It never has been their job to do so. Even the most justifiable of conflicts have not placed American soldiers in a position to relieve politicians of their responsibility to grapple with the tension between morality and expediency in war. Soldiers have, after all, their own war-induced demons with which they are obliged to wrestle. On his own journey of self-discovery at Gettysburg, Chamberlain himself, as portrayed by Shaara, confronts this disconcerting fact. Preparing to address the mutineers of the 2nd Maine, Chamberlain assured himself that "the American fights for mankind, for freedom, for the people not the land." Yet in the course of the battle that follows, Chamberlain finds that no cause can adequately explain the ferocity with which the two armies collide. Above all, no cause can explain the abandon with which he himself has fought and the profound exhilaration that he derives from his own intimate encounter with killing and death on a field of almost incomprehensible slaughter.

After Appomattox, the real Chamberlain returned to Maine and lived a long life as his state's most honored and revered citizen. The liberating army in which he had served dispersed, almost overnight. In short order, the former slaves, for whose freedom that army had ostensibly fought, returned to quasi-bondage at the hands of Southern white supremacists. The cause of freedom, to the extent that it had ever actually mattered, was forgotten.

To imagine that in the present age American soldiers can help the United States steer clear of comparable moral failures is to impose on them an unfair burden. For a nation that aspires to political and cultural hegemony on a global scale, it is also a dangerous illusion.