How productions designers for The Long Road Home staged a famous battle of the Iraq War at Fort Hood Recreating famous battles makes for riveting television, as this fall?s highly touted documentary on the Vietnam War makes clear. But another, lesser-seen production on the National Geographic Channel has taken great pains to recreate the look and feel of a more recent battle of the Iraq War.
Based on The Long Road Home, ABC journalist Martha Raddatz?s account of a harrowing 2004 ambush and subsequent battles in Sadr City, a Baghdad neighborhood, a new miniseries strives to transport viewers to both the battlefield, and the family drama at home. For production designer Seth Reed, that meant digging into stories that soldiers often aren?t comfortable sharing, and accurately recreating architectural styles from half a world away. ?You know those stories about how someone?s grandpa may not talk about what they went through during WWII"? Reed says. ?Soldiers don?t talk about this kind of stuff. But we needed the environment to be convincing for soldiers and everybody else from the Arabic world.?

The crew constructed buildings across 12 acres, creating 85 new structures and modifying 28. Actors could drive real tanks down realistic streets seemingly lifted from Iraq for a full half-mile.

It also meant constructing a gargantuan set, one of the largest standing sets in North America. To achieve a high degree of realism, the crew worked with the U.S....