|
“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.
|