|
“Ground Truth,” A documentary
film, directed by Patricia Foulkrod
Documentary filmmaker Patricia Foulkrod’s
“Ground Truth” is the strongest film indictment yet against the Bush
administration’s deadly folly in Iraq—a trumped-up war perpetrated on a
foreign country and its people. The film opens with shots of U.S.
soldiers’ contorted bodies strewn about on dirt roads, and then segues
into interviews with recruits, soldiers, and vets.
We are in a Venice Boulevard military
recruitment office in 2005. Recruits speak on camera saying they signed up
because there’s nothing else to do, no job, no prospects, no money for
college; besides, their friends joined, and they like the uniforms.
Chicks dig ’em.
One recruit, Rob Sarra, is totally gung
ho. He wants to go because he gets to “blow shit up.” In a later scene he
confesses to having misgivings about the war. Near tears, he recounts how
he shot and killed a woman in a black chador because he was trained to
kill anything on the streets that moved. He found out later she had been
trying to pull a white flag from her pocket to wave.
Now, as vets, these guys, anywhere from
18 to 25, feel they were duped. Only in basic training did they finally
get that they were there to learn to kill people. One interviewee says
that there should be a label on recruitment literature like on
cigarettes: “Warning: you could be wounded or die.”
A startling revelation comes from Lt.
Col. Dave Grossman, who states that men in basic training during World
War II showed reluctance to kill human beings. So, beginning with Vietnam,
the training was overhauled. Now, in boot camp, a soldier is completely
broken down. Not only is he shorn of hair, but stripped mentally,
psychologically, and physically to become an efficient killing machine.
One vet recalls some lyrics they chanted
while jogging: “Kill kids in a school or school yard or church!” He says
it got to a point where you want to kill.
The filmmaker uses a chilling clip that
was obviously shot by a soldier looking through a gunsight. In the
crosshairs is a group of Iraqi civilians crossing a street. We not only
hear the order to shoot, but also the rasping acceleration of the
soldier’s breath; then see a cloud of greenish smoke and the civilians
vanish.
Americans show support for the troops
while they are in Iraq or Afghanistan, a soldier points out, but the
government lets them down once they are home. Benefits get mired in a
bureaucratic swamp. Foulkrod filmed a veterans’ support group meeting,
where one wounded soldier says the VA told him his case would be decided
in 120 days. “By then,” he complains, “you either heal and are sent back
to Iraq and your case is dropped, or you die!” Angry voices rise in
agreement. Some vets think of suicide daily. The Defense Department will
not talk about it.
The filmmaker interviewed parents of a
baby-faced vet barely out of his teens. He had come home physically
unscathed, but suffering post-traumatic stress. He talks about abuses
fellow soldiers wreaked: beating women on the head with bottles, whipping
children with car antennae. He ends up hanging himself in the garage.
Before returning home, Marines are
questioned by psychologists. If Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is
indicated, they are not sent home but “cured” in country, so that they
can be redeployed. One civilian psychologist states that the military’s
stance is that combat does not cause PTSD; it ties a vet’s condition to
non-military factors. Soldiers confide that once home, they feel lost,
like ghosts in society, paranoid, feeling they don’t fit anywhere. People
call them heroes, but won’t listen to them.
Still, most can’t talk about the
horrors—sensing that loved ones fear them. On camera, women say their men
return as strangers with whom they can no longer communicate. Vets suffer
nightmares, and find it hard to relate because they’ve lost the
camaraderie they had with their buddies.
Many want to go back to Iraq in order to
have a purpose. Yet more vets are speaking out against the war and join
antiwar organizations. At one such organization, one says, “Iraq vets are
the children of us Vietnam vets.”
If not physically injured, all except a
very few are compromised psychologically and emotionally. Your impulse is
to turn away when a vet, with a reconstructed face so damaged it looks
like a Halloween horror mask, bravely speaks on camera about trying to
drink himself to death. He believes he is still alive for a reason.
The vets Foulkrod interviewed are
intelligent, articulate men who hope their experience made them wise—yet
it didn’t absolve them. These soldiers cannot forgive themselves for what
they have done, so let “Ground Truth” serve as a means through which they
can hang on to their sanity.
|
