PREMIERE.COM'S MOVIE REVIEW (posted 9/15/06)

Patricia Foulkrod begins her documentary with tight, starkly intimate close-ups of young veterans from this Iraq war. Her camera stays in so close for the first 15 or 20 minutes of the film that you can't tell which of the young men and women speaking about their experiences in the war have come home physically broken from it. When Reuben Aaronson's camera finally pulls back to reveal a missing hand, crippled legs, a scarred face, it's almost anticlimactic, because what every one of these candid young veterans has in common is that they've all come home emotionally and psychologically damaged from killing and seeing their friends killed. Most damningly, they also have in common resistance to yet another war, one their government is waging in despicable silence: a campaign to deprive them medical treatment for their injuries.

A former producer for PBS, Foulkrod assembled her film from hours of interviews with veterans of Operate Iraqi Freedom, Desert Storm, and the Vietnam War, as well as their families. The testimony of the Marines and infantry soldiers in this film make it a searing document, a stammering, broken account of what happens to quite ordinary young Americans when they're sent to a war none of their superiors were prepared for and still cannot quantify. Most damaging are the hardened faces of Joyce and Kevin Lucey, whose son Jeffrey, a Marine reservist, hanged himself after returning home and suffering from months of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The individual stories in The Ground Truth, tragic as they are, after a while blend into the greater tapestry of horrors that most Americans have become immune to in recent years. Add their stories to the festering miasma of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo tribunals, civilian contractors murdered and burned in Fallujah, cluster bombs, inadequate body armor, and all you get is dulled hurt, a kind of numb, inarticulate sorrow. Foulkrod's film is understandably one-sided; many of the former soldiers she interviewed have become activists against the war. It might have been provocative and fascinating had she interviewed veterans who still support action in Iraq, but that would have been a different work. This film, a raw howl of outrage and pain, is proudly one-sided, allowing a generation of wounded men and women to scream their betrayal.

Aside from the Luceys' testimony, the film's most searing indictment comes when a Marine reservist explains how his PTSD was diagnosed as a “personality disorder,” a condition the Veterans' Administration then refused to treat since they alleged it wasn't caused by his service. Foulkrod doesn't get into how widespread this insidious practice might be, but the sheer negligent lunacy of declaring soldiers, fresh from armed combat, afflicted with personality disorders, is mind-boggling.

Will The Ground Truth change minds about this war? I don't know. I do know that every single American, the people funding this war with their tax dollars; the people paying $3 for a gallon of gasoline; the people approving upwards of $70 billion in appropriations to keep the war going; the people whose husbands, sons, sisters, and neighbors are coming home in body bags, in pieces, or in despair, should see this film and ask whether any ideal or any goal is worth what's happening to this mangled generation. —Sara Brady