The Ground Truth

The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends

I was blessed that he was home and not in a body bag or coffin, but a part of him died over there, and I know he'll never be the same person. - Nickie Huze, wife of Corporal Sean Huze, US Marine Corps

The things we had to do over there...we left our souls in Iraq. - Herold Noel, Private First Class, US Army

War is always a dark closet. You never know what you are going to find once you open that door. I have a proposal to make. Lets not wait 20 or 30 years, let’s start now, let’s build a monument to the Iraqi War dead. Let’s honor them now. I know the Washington Mall is already filled with marble and granite dedicated to the likes of Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and the Vietnam fallen. My suggestion is virgin land, Crawford, Texas, maybe, across the road from the President’s driveway. I know, I know it is private land, but the owner is a conservative Republican and I am sure that he would sell his land to construct a monument to Eugene Debs if the price was right, and what is more red, white, and blue than honoring our soldiers. I want the kind of monument that our Commander-and-Chief can enjoy for the rest of his life. When he is on the way to one of his $100,000 speaking engagements, and it is there. He will be getting ready for a photo op. of him chopping pre-cut brush and he has to move slightly because its shadow plays havoc with the lighting. I want the last thing he sees out of his 102-year-old eyes, because I want him to live a long, long time to see the mess America has to clean up because of his administration, to be it. It is so Old Testament. We have done it before in America. Just go to Washington D.C., to Arlington National Cemetery. It was the home of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Union Brigadier General Montgomery C. Meigs was so bitter by Lee’s taking command of Southern forces, especially because the war cost Meigs his son, that he wanted Lee to never forget what he did. He started burying the dead along the roadside leading up to Lee’s home, then he built a vault where Mrs. Lee’s rose garden was. It housed the remains of the 1,800 that died at Bull Run. By war’s end, Meigs had placed more than 16,000 Union dead on the grounds of Robert E. Lee’s estate. It was salting the earth, and maybe, it can work, maybe an elder W. giving advice to a young President would remember all the people’s lives that were ruined due to lack of planning and bad decision making. I don’t know. I would like to think we could learn.

I know that Republican zombies are going to champion the war no matter what, the anti-war crowd is going to go Amen to anything that gets us out of any further conflicts, and the average American is going to wonder what they want to have for supper. A great malaise has spread across the nation in regards to the Iraq War. The war is like a Dear John letter sitting on the counter, as long as we don’t read it or think about it, it is not real and might work out for the best. Still, I think everyone can agree that we all support the troops.

Director Patricia Foulkrod has made a film that I am sure our Joint Chiefs of Staff would not want you to see. This is a muckraking documentary that shows how we mistreat our sons and daughter from basic training to their return home from Iraq. This is not our sanitized war as seen on the 6 o'clock news. Using interviews from about a dozen soldiers to backup her case, Foulkrod presents what killing and war have done to too many young people’s lives. Starting from the moment a young person meets with a recruiter, they are lied to. These patriotic young folk are promised the world, told of the educational opportunities that await them, the medical benefits they will receive, and the valuable career training opportunities that they will gain in the military. In the best John Wayne tradition, they are sold a bill of goods that they are serving God and country, and in turn, they will be taken care of. Using footage shot by an ex-Marine in basic training, she details how these young people are psychologically played with and transformed into a cog in the machine. Sent into a war zone with inferior equipment, many have trouble adjusting to the stresses of war. For many, the war is just one long camping trip, but for those in the war zone, having to kill someone is often more than they can deal with. Unlike other war documentaries, Foulkrod’s movie is bolstered by images shot by an embedded Italian reporter. For the first time, American citizens get an uncensored look at war. We see our dead soldier and Iraqi civilians and what actual combat looks like. With an administration that has slashed pay and under-funding medical benefits and programs, God forbid if you are wounded. When their service time is done, many are unprepared to return to civilian life with the army doing nothing to see if they are psychologically fit to do so. These are deep wounds, that even if they seek help, the VA is unable to deal with. While it is clear that Foulkrod is against the war, even the biggest chicken hawk around has to admit that there is a lot of truth to the charges she makes. This is the best documentary about the Iraq War to date and I hope that this documentary is able to get a distributor in this altra-patriotic time.

While the Bush administration’s stance of not dwelling on the mistakes that got us into this war is much like the cheating husband telling his wife it doesn’t matter how they got VD, they have it, now how are they going to deal with it. The real question that we need to wrestle with is how do we avoid a war like this in the future. I would have thought the lessons of Vietnam would have still been fresh in our minds, but Ronald Reagan’s morning in America made us forget certain realities. Maybe, just maybe, a statue or a monument of some kind would make us never forget. There is always hope.

Verdict: A Shocking Documentary