The Ground Truth (review)

"The return from the killing fields is more than a debriefing… it is a slow ascent from hell." These words (borrowed from author James Hillman) serve as an epigraph in The Ground Truth, Patricia Foulkrod's unsettling documentary that confirms some of our greatest fears about the human costs of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Through interviews with dozens of American veterans and their families, The Ground Truth exposes many of the permanent physical and mental traumas suffered by American troops in these increasingly unmanageable conflicts. Channeling the spirit of Ernst Friedrich's post-World War I photographic essay War Against War! (1924), the film sets out to demystify militaristic attitudes and the ideologies of war through uncensored portrayals of the destruction, terror, and inhumanity of state-sponsored violence. But the film is more than an emotional anti-war text; it is also a poised critique of how the United States military mistreats its own soldiers and veterans. This unflinching look at the values and practices of the modern American military, the most powerful and perfected killing machine of all time, may distress even the most gung-ho of viewers.

Combining documentary footage with the words and memories of American veterans, The Ground Truth sketches the four stages of the average grunt's experience: enlistment, training, combat, and homecoming. The film opens with footage of the Marine Corps' "Recruitment Day 2005" in Venice Beach, California, an outdoors "family event" where buff Marines encourage local youths to pose with shoulder-launched missile weapons. Against these visuals, veterans recall their initial motives for enlisting. For some, the military's pay, benefits, and training were too good to pass up. Others were guided by patriotic sentiments. Specialist Robert Acosta, who lost his hand in Iraq, saw the Army as a way out from his dangerous neighborhood. Sergeant Rob Sarra joined the Marines so that he could "go blow s—- up." Remarkably, most of the film's interviewees remember receiving aggressive pitches from recruiters who dismissed or lied about the risks of enlisting. Staff Sergeant Jimmy J. Massey, a scarred veteran of the Iraq War and a former Marine Corps recruiter, bluntly describes the Marines' recruitment system as one "designed to fraud [sic], manipulate, lie, cheat beg, borrow, and steal" in which recruiters will say or do anything to meet enlistment quotas.

The film then shifts to footage taken in a Marine Corps boot camp two months before the invasion of Iraq. This rare footage offers such an uncensored look at basic training that one wonders how it came into Foulkrod's hands. We watch as exhausted recruits cry in pain, scream war cries, thrust bayonets into dummies, and suffer verbal abuse from their drill sergeants. In one memorable clip, a drill sergeant interrupts a group prayer to call a fidgety male recruit a "bitch" (instances like this are interspersed throughout the film and could serve to caution anyone who thinks the military is no longer a chauvinistic institution). As these clips roll, the film's interviewees describe their own experiences in boot camp. "Everything is associated around killing," recalls Army Ranger Chad Reiber. "You actually start wanting to do it." Navy Petty Officer Charlie Anderson recites a common boot camp cadence about killing civilians and children: "Ring the bell inside the schoolhouse/ Watch those kiddies gather 'round/ Lock and load with your two-forty/ Mow them little mother———- down." Anderson reflects, "And if you get a whole group of people singing this, it gets kind of catchy—it's a group dynamic." It is clear that through realistic combat simulations and the systematic dehumanization of 'the enemy' (rifle targets are called "Bin Laden's" and "Taliban," Muslims and Arabs are referred to as "rag heads" and "Hajjis"), killing becomes a conditioned reflex for recruits going to the Middle East.

Of course, basic training could never completely prepare American infantry for the conditions of the Iraq War, a conflict in which there are no front lines and the enemy could be anyone. Describing the near impossibility of discerning insurgents...