The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends

This film illustrates the worst part of surviving war, the memories. For many soldiers, men and women alike, returning home can be the beginning of real problems. I am reminded of my father and his brothers returning from WWII. For one of my uncles the war was never over. He survived the D-Day invasion, something akin to the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. For him the memories not only lingered but tortured him. He became an alcoholic as did several of my cousins, his sons. Jump ahead 60 years and place the soldiers in a different war, in a different country, the result is the same. When I saw this at the KC FilmFest, I was reminded that there are somethings about war that never change. The idealistic young men and women are not spared the emotional torment of what happened in Iraq, and especially if you are against the war you will come away with more compassion for the soldiers there trying to do what they believe or have been told is right.

The tag line from the Vietnam war film Platoon says it all. "The First Casualty of War is Innocence."

There is an episode of The Simpsons which has a joke news report referring to an army training base as a "Killbot Factory". Here the comment is simply part of a throwaway joke, but what Patricia Foulkrod's documentary does is show us, scarily, that it is not that far from the truth. After World War Two the US Army decided to tackle a problem they faced throughout the war; that many soldiers got into battle and found themselves totally unable to kill another human being unless it was a matter of 'me or them'. Since then the training process of the US army has been to remove all moral scruples and turn recruits into killing machines who don't think of combatants as people. To develop in them a most unnatural state: "The sustainable urge to kill".

First off, this isn't an antiwar movie as such. Whilst it certainly paints war in a very bad light, Foulkrod focuses rather on an aspect that doesn't get as much media attention as, say, the debate over the legality of a war or it's physical successes or failures; the affect the process of turning a man into a soldier has on that person as a human being. It's the paradox that to train someone to be a soldier to defend society makes them totally unsuitable to live as part of that society themselves, and whilst most of the examples and interviewees are from the current Middle East conflict Foulkrod makes the links to past conflicts, especially Vietnam, painfully clear. This isn't about any particular war, it's about the problems caused by war in general.

Structurally the film seems to be split into three sections; how recruits are drawn into the army and the training they receive, how they are treated once they are in combat, and what happens once they leave the army. Once this point is reached you realise that the main target of this film is actually the policies that are inherent in the armed forced, policies that are put into place to make soldiers into an affective combat force but removing all humanity from the individuals. Those interviewed tell the camera how the recruiting process seems so clean and simple, how word like "democracy" and "freedom" are banded around, but once the training begins they become "enemy" and "kill" and "destroy". How once in action soldiers don't care what they are ordered to do, as they are ingrained with the idea that as soon as they carry out an order, whatever it may be, they are one step closer to going home. They have no political or social ideals to fight for but fight and kill as that's what they've been trained to do.

But The Ground Truth's main goal is to highlight the way the US Army discards those who have fought for their country once they return home. There is no real rehabilitation given to soldiers returning, and many are forced to go home unable to cope with what they have seen and done, and most policies in place seem to be to make sure the army has no legal responsibility whatsoever for psychological affects their soldiers pick up. This is the final indignity, that once they are used they are cast away.

If there is a flaw in the film it is that Foulkrod doesn't attempt to show another side to the argument. You would get the impression that every single soldier who ever went to war would come back with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. It would have been interesting to see those of a… less liberal upbringing give their opinions of how the army handles training and policies. There is never a chance for the other side of the argument to make itself known.

But other than that this is an expertly crafted documentary, and Foulkrod's use of stock footage and music is perfectly utilised to get across a side of war that too often get s passed by when discussing the fallout of war.

The information contained in this movie is somewhat familiar to many who have been paying attention to the news lately. The Walter Reed scandals show a small part of the fact that we are not doing a good job taking care of our injured heroes when they return.

What this movie further shows is a truth common to all wars. The psychological trauma that soldiers suffer while engaging in war and the difficulty they have when returning to civilian life. They are not just changed or affected, they are different people and most do not know how to deal with that as they do not know themselves.

Finally, this film shows what the military does to our young men in women in getting them ready for war and the policies and practices that they have to follow in prosecuting war that leads to all the psychological trauma.

We have over 3000 dead soldiers in the four years of this invasion; but we have many tens of thousands that will suffer lifelong physical and psychological trauma because of this war. It doesn't matter what side you are on, it behooves you to know the cost of war to decide if we should be in that business. This film illustrates the costs to the men and women perfectly.

Do not expect a depiction of the "truth". However, the accounts of these veterans of the Iraqi & Afghanistan wars demand thoughtful consideration.

The major strength of the film is that it vividly portrays the words and war wounds of these vets and their post-war struggles to reconstruct some degree of normalcy and functionality to their lives.

My major criticism of the film is twofold: it is one-sided and it advocates anti-war activism but nothing more to correct the serious shortcomings of the military's and Veterans Affairs' programs for helping those who've suffered and still suffer the traumas of war. These are NOT fatal flaws of the film.

As a veteran myself, I know that the horrible aftermath of war is real, and these young men and women articulate it very well. These vets vividly describe the physical and mental pain and torment that most veterans experience and that ordinary people need to understand because the horrors of ALL wars are so traumatic and disturbing.

One of the more bizarre things about the war in the Middle East, at least from a British perspective, was how all-too-keen we were to wade on in with the Americans in the name of fighting 'terror'. This is when, for the decades born out of the strife that followed the Irish Civil War, we nary went anywhere near an enemy far closer to home and far more prone to a defeat than any stretch of land pertaining to throw a seemingly unlimited amount of Muslims at you. We are, of course, speaking about Britain's struggle with the Irish Republican Army – an organisation whose actions over the years have meant that, even prior to the respective invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, terrorism and the threat of terrorism was nothing at all new to the U.K. There was never any conquest of The Emerald Isle, but that never stopped any Briton fervently celebrating its patron saint on March the 17th (as the day of their own, St. George, goes largely unnoticed) nor grinning affectionately when recalling the charming image of a typically lovable Irishman, whose fondness for beer is matched only by his penchant for boxing, comes to mind. There was no crusade up and down the streets and through the cities of Ireland, searching for the dogs responsible for destroying pubs and hotels up and down our country like there is in The Middle East, where untold horrors are being bestowed upon people who probably aren't even interested in the West, but are most likely becoming more and more radicalised as an invading force loiters unwelcomely.

But to an extent, I digress. In The Ground Truth, a probing American documentary from Patricia Foulkrod which is more about the mindset of the solider and how rotten, lying American politicians essentially con their young men into fighting a war they really don't want to be anywhere near, we cover more-so the process of what happens to a grunt from their basic training to the harsh realities of post-war life than any sort of political sub-study. The documentary begins in late 2005 with a Venice Beach-set inauguration, as American men enlist to join the forces. They are young and energetic; they are surrounded by advertising boards informing the onlooker of a body building product and there is very much this presence of masculinity. We learn that some signed up because a recruitment officer was convincing enough, others tell us that the allure of merely escaping one's neighbourhood and travelling the world was enough to join - one informs us they saw "Top Gun" and joined – a film which didn't even depict the Army but was about the Air Force, and was actually about Americans 'fighting' in a war that never even happened but for on the ice rinks of Lake Placid and across the chessboards of Reykjavik.

The whole thing reminds us of the opening act of Oliver Stone's "Born on the Fourth of July", made by a man who had already been there and already done that – a film wherein one's very essence of even being a man is questioned should one refute going to war. The entire process is, of course, in preparation for fighting in Iraq – arguably the biggest sham war in the history of mankind; a war so futile, unpleasant and unnecessary that everybody, from anti-war politicians who're at the top of their game anyway, right the way through to a 2008 produced episode of "Family Guy" which depicts one of its characters being told that we're in Iraq because 9/11 was induced by "a bunch of Saudi Arabians, Lebanese and Egyptians financed by a Saudi Arabian guy living in Afghanistan and sheltered by Pakistanis" have had a respective 'pop' at it.

To an extent, it is a 21st Century "Korea"; a conflict whereby, thanks to latter-day MacArthurism, we have conspired to go on an ego-centric death march into neighbouring Iraq (China) having defeated the majority of the Afghan (North Korean) army. It is a war so false and so vehemently putrid that even the pro-war American politicians want nothing to do with it in earnest: who could forget the agonising sequence in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11", wherein he poses to several American politicians, application forms in hand, that they send their own sons over there to fight the good fight? The Ground Truth weasels out the lies Americans are told in order to sign up; tells of the realities of the fighting and the post-war fighting that the politicians don't bother with, things that are not limited to the losing of one's mind when all is said and done. Americans, in this regard, have is good and healthy: British veterans of the conflict, after having left the Army, are forced into living on the streets while immigrants who can barely speak the language are given houses – those characters in "Jarhead", a film set during Gulf War One about how conflict didn't actually kick off for some troops, never had it so good.

There was a very interesting quote I remember finding in a history text book at my old school some years ago, a quote made by an American who fought in both World War II as well as the Vietnam War. He spoke of how in WWII, you knew who your enemy was: you wore the green uniform, they wore the grey ones and the idea was to push through Europe and into Berlin. Cut to twenty years later and confusion reigns in Vietnam, where nobody knew who the enemy was; where the enemy were; where anyone was going or what anyone was trying to achieve. Some people don't like to compare Iraq to Vietnam, but the material we see and hear in Foulkrod's documentary makes it hard not to think of the above; observe what's happening and draw one's own conclusions – this is a tough, powerful work of non-fiction which works well.