Remarkably few feature films have been made that portray the events of the Gulf War onscreen, especially given the popularity of Vietnam and World War II films. It appears that the desire to weave the Gulf War into the symbolic narrative, to create a cinematic “Gulf War” – the way Vietnam films have done for the Vietnam War, or World War II films have done for World War II – is simply not present. One explanation is that, as Baudrillard titled his controversial essay: “[t]he gulf war did not take place.” While something definitely did take place, it was so radically different than our traditional understanding of war that we may not even be able to call it ‘war’ anymore . . . Because of this conflict between what war is symbolically supposed to mean and what the Gulf War actually was, filmmakers have sidestepped the war itself or otherwise distanced the war-time events from it, often depending on older films or other narratives as shorthand, as opposed to showing the purported “real catastrophes” of war. These issues may be less pressing now than the were before the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their attendant violence, but the legacy of the first Gulf War is still well worth teasing out.