The Dixie Chicks and the Good Soldiers

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That tactic keeps a soldier alive for another day, but it doesn’t stop agonies of self-recrimination at night, or for many nights to come. Mary Nguyen, an official of the Veterans’ Administration in Dallas, quotes a poem: "Yes, the war is over. And over and over and over in my mind." They bring the war home with them, but often they’re not the people they were when they left — once a civilian, now a killing machine. "There’s an old saying," Nguyen adds. "If you’re a good soldier, you’ll be a bad civilian." Sometimes the transition is fatal. When Jeff Lucey came back from Iraq, his loving family noticed the change, his withdrawal inside his troubled skull. Within a few months, he had put a loop in a garden hose and hanged himself. Only death ended his nightmares.

I guess that many soldiers have returned from Iraq to resume normal lives. The Ground Truth shows that many others have come back dented or crushed. At the beginning of the film we see them testifying in closeup; later the camera pans back, and too many of them are missing a hand or a leg. "Just the other day," Army veteran Robert Acosta recalls, "this guy asked me, how did I lose my hand? And I told him I lost it in the war. And he said, ‘What war?’ And I said the war in Iraq. And he said, ‘That’s still goin’ on?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, dude, it’s still goin’ on.’"

Other wounds are invisible but palpable. The most common wound for returning soldiers is brain injury. Some of these, as in Jeff Lucey’s case, are undiagnosed. Other soldiers find that the military refuses to diagnose their lingering malaise as post-traumatic stress disorder. As they were not issued proper protective gear for their uniforms and their tanks while in Iraq, they are too often denied treatment for the wounds they suffered there and brought home with them.

The dozen or so main interview subjects in The Ground Truth are an attractive, articulate, thoughtful bunch; they make an American viewer proud they represented you abroad, and hopeful about the next generation of leaders. I wish that Huze and Sarra and a few others would run for Congress, to serve as the haunted, haunting conscience of the American grunt. "Many of us are realizing, the military, that fight wasn’t our fight," one vet says. "This is our fight."

The Ground Truth, which is the best film I’ve seen to emerge from the 9/11 attacks and the war that followed, is implicitly antiwar, I suppose. But it’s undeniably pro-troops — the ones who went to Iraq at the country’s call, and are now speaking out, demanding veterans’ rights, a simple appreciation of their service and its awful cost. Some might say that to criticize the country you fought for is conduct unbecoming an officer. Huze disagrees: "[If] I didn’t speak out about it, that would be unbecoming."