Captain Nawa Salah Ahmed was not thinking of Hollywood when he signed up for the bomb-disposal unit in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk. It was 2004, and the young policeman was burnt out. He had enlisted in the force when the American military invaded his homeland, taking a job in the local criminal-investigations unit. And as a lawless chaos had come crashing down upon the country, business, so to speak, was booming. Cases flooded in—Ahmed dealt daily with thefts, murders, and worse. But the pressure, he says, was unrelenting.

So a year into his police career, he applied for and secured a transfer—one that gave him personal ease, but thrust his family in a roiling dread. He joined the Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit, universally referred to by its English acronym, E.O.D.—and known to Americans as “the Hurt Locker guys.”

As his family protested his transfer, he reassured them by saying his new job was actually safer than his old one, in which he was harangued by criminals and terrorists, made a target for revenge. “Bombs,” he would say, “don’t have tongues.”

Ahmed and his colleagues watched the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker as they have seen countless Hollywood films since the U.S. invasion—on pirated DVDs bought in the bazaar at roughly a dollar apiece. The illicit discs have sustained Iraq’s appetite for mainstream Western films, long after the last cinema theaters were shuttered by threats from puritanical militias. Iraqi interest in The Hurt Locker peaked at the time of its Oscar success in early 2010, and though the story of American bomb-disposal experts was set in their country, few Iraqis identified with the film. Many complained at the way the soldiers of an occupying army had been portrayed as heroes, struggling to contain the conflict. Where were the trigger-happy foreign troops, firing recklessly at civilians, they asked?

Not all the criticism was political. Some Iraqi connoisseurs of the blockbuster felt the film had failed as entertainment. Not enough stunts, special effects, or sexy ladies, they said.

Kirkuk’s E.O.D. officers, like Ahmed, saw the film through unique filters—they contrasted it with their own experience of bomb disposal in Iraq. They could also compare what they saw on screen with what they had seen of their American counterparts. “It was a cartoon,” says Adnan Salah Rashid, a three-star captain with the bomb squad, as he recalls Jeremy Renner’s protagonist. He chuckles at a scene in which Renner unearths a roadside bomb—one rigged with artillery shells—and single-handedly drags it to safety. “Only civilians could fall for that. No way would a professional guy do those things in real life,” he says.

Ahmed also felt the film had exaggerated the bravery of the American E.O.D. officers. The ones he knew were slow and thorough, compared with the characters in the film and, indeed, with the Iraqis. “We’re always in a hurry; we want to finish the job and go home early. It’s an Iraqi habit. We’ll wrap up in one hour what the Americans do in three.”

Unlike the American military, the bomb-disposal officers in Kirkuk’s police force work close to their homes, in a male-dominant society. Most are married and stay in extended families that depend on their wages. After every shift, the officers return to the people who would suffer most if they were killed at work. Their families remind them of their primary responsibility.

“We don’t want our children to grow up fatherless. We don’t want our wives to be shamed by our deaths,” says Rashid. He believes the Iraqis’ proximity to their families has given them a sharper instinct for self-preservation compared with the Americans.