Why I (Would) Love to Shoot War Movies

Because this looks like a lot of fun (an excerpt from American Cinematographer magazine, on how they shot one of the battle sequences in HBO's The Pacific):

The landing on Peleliu marks the introduction to combat for Pvt. Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazzello). Adefarasin and episode director Carl Franklin designed five shots that followed Sledge as he landed on shore, scrambled up the beach amid constant mortar attacks, and finally dove into the safety of a bunker. They want the five shots to play as one extended shot (with the smoke from the explosions masking the cuts), and they wanted to make the sequence as experiential as possible for the audience. "In a case like that, you really have to work out how to join those five shots before you start shooting," notes Adefarasin.

The plan called for a series of camera hand-offs among the camera operators, Simon Finney (A camera), Ben Fox-Wilson (B camera) and Adefarasin (C camera). The first operator starts the shot right behind Sledge as he tumbles out the Amtrac and starts to run up the beach. At a certain point, the operator hands off the camera to the next operator, who continues running behind Sledge and then hands off the camera to a third operator, who is sitting on a crane. The crane swoops around a patch of impossible-to-navigate terrain, at which point the camera is handed off one more time to the operator who follows Sledge into the bunker. "Simon preferred looking through the lens, but Ben and I used an LCD screen [as a viewfinder]," recalls Adefarasin. "Simon kept the camera on his shoulder and turned into a goat, running like hell and keeping his eye glued to the eyepiece."