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Documentary on Iraq ‘Truth’ Reveals Bias: A Review of The Ground Truth

Patricia Foulkrod’s The Ground Truth tells the story of the Iraq War veteran’s recruitment, training, combat experience, and return home through the testament of several former soldiers, sailors, and Marines who have experienced many forms of physical or psychological injury while in Iraq. The film was shown on February 19 as the inaugural presentation of the Iraq War Series at Vanderbilt University. The month and a half-long series is sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Students, Project Dialogue, and the University Lectures Committee, with support from the Film Studies program, the Philosophy department, Sarratt Art Studios, Vanderbilt Speakers Committee, and Vanderbilt Student Communications (this paper’s parent corporation).
Organized by David Wood, Centennial Professor of Philosophy, and Joel Logiudice, director of the Office of Arts and Creative Engagement for the Dean of Students, the series includes several films, a lecture, and panel discussions about the war in Iraq. According to Wood, the series’ purpose “is to bring home the reality and true cost of war by portrayals from many different angles – that of soldiers, their families, Iraqi citizens, corporate profiteers and the media.”

Foulkrod’s documentary attempts to present the entire scope of the war veteran’s experience by including interviews with over fifteen different veterans or veterans’ family members as they recount their involvement in the Iraq War. The film does an excellent job at moving chronologically through the experience, beginning with the recruitment and ending with the lives and activities of soldiers after they return home. Snippets of interview from each person tell the story without any narration, an effective style that adds authenticity to the complex narrative.

The audience hears the pre-war stories of some of the veterans, including those of Robert Acosta, who joined the Army as alternative to the gang-oriented lifestyle of his Southern California neighborhood, and Paul Rieckhoff, a third-generation soldier who joined the Army Reserves and volunteered for active duty on the eve of the invasion. These early experiences with the military are presented in a context of naiveté; we hear one veteran explain how his recruiter assured him that he would “definitely” not be involved in combat, and other accounts support the claim that recruiters downplayed the threat of war while stressing the “cool” aspects of the military. The film frames recruitment as an experience of half-truths that gloss over the strife of war, of which we are expected to hear about soon enough.

Before this, however, Foulkrod examines the intensive training the veterans underwent. This segment provides the bulk of the context for the rest of the film. The interviews focus on the intensity and rigor of basic combat training, and we hear about the psychological aspect of the reforming of soldiers into killing machines. With varying degrees of shamefulness, the veterans reveal some details about the indoctrination that occurred during basic training, and we are shown footage of a recruit bayoneting a dummy during training as a veteran recounts with little effort a chant learned in training imploring soldiers to kill Arabs. The intended effect is clearly to negatively present combat training deployed in Iraq as a reconstruction of the mind of the soldier into that of a trained killer.

This smoothly segues into a new narrative about the war itself, and we can understand the ease of the transition from boot camp to the battlefield. The veterans explain how their training put them in a position to perform, in their words, atrocious acts of violence. We are subjected to a particularly emotional story from one soldier about an Iraqi woman who is shot and killed as she approaches a group of Army vehicles. The woman had been told repeatedly to stop, and when she reached into her clothing for what could have been a weapon, the soldiers opened fire. The veteran tells, in what is clearly intended to be the emotional high point of the movie, how the woman was not pulling out a gun but actually a white flag of surrender.

At this point, the film delves into two major post-war issues: the injuries of the interviewed veterans and those veterans’ subsequent forays into anti-war activism. Foulkrod’s underlying agenda rears its ugly head as we are made to sympathize further with already-sympathetic individuals. Through strategic camerawork, she reveals that many of the veterans have physical injuries that the interview shots have obscured, from missing limbs to horrible skin burns that would make the hardest of hearts soften. At the same time, the veiled anti-war statements made by the veterans throughout the movie (“I started to think, what are we doing here?”) become blatant. One minute, Robert Acosta moves us while speaking about losing his left leg, and the next, former soldier and member of Iraq Veterans Against the War Perry O’Brian waxes academic about the meaninglessness of the war.

The revelation that nearly every veteran interviewed for the film is involved with anti-war groups forces us to reevaluate the previous hour or so of footage and commentary. In retrospect, much of the film depends on the viewer’s ability to sympathize with the soldiers early on so that the peace message shared by the select group of veterans and (presumably) the director becomes easier to digest. To a degree, the sly tactic is effective in the confines of the film. There are no scenes of peacenik rallies or the abhorrent Code Pink-style demonstrations that undoubtedly paint the American anti-war movement as narcissistic and a far cry from its glory days during Vietnam. Instead, we hear a seemingly tempered argument from the people at the front lines of the war, men and a few women who have seen the war, have returned, and are using their right to free speech to speak out against it. The majority of the film uses the full experience narrative as a tool to legitimize these veterans and, by proxy, their message. These aren’t far-off observers sitting in comfortable offices or classrooms determining their opinions on the war from media coverage, Foulkrod means for us to think; these people are the real deal, full-blown soldiers with the scars, physical and emotional, to prove it.

But herein lies the ultimate flaw of the film. Just as Foulkrod relies on our emotional response to pass along her message, the emotions of the veterans focused on in the movie appear to influence their anti-war sentiments. A soldier watches men of his unit kill a civilian they mistakenly believed to be a threat, and he suddenly realizes that war is wrong and he is a murdering tool of the looming military-industrial complex. It sounds great for the script of a Hollywood drama, but the intellectual rationale (assuming there is one) for that soldier’s dissent is exchanged for a cheapened appeal to emotion. This ultimately leaves the thoughtful viewer feeling used by the director’s clever use of camerawork and interview clips.

Ultimately, The Ground Truth works as a documentary in that in conveys an agenda through the words and images of some apparently reputable sources. Nevertheless, the blatant omission of any veteran with an opposite view of the war compels us to question the honesty of Foulkrod’s presentation. We hear from these veterans only after they have begun their activism; their positions as anti-war activists means we must take their claims of atrocious and immoral actions by American servicemen on faith. The preponderance of contrasting testimonial evidence from both veterans and soldiers still on the ground (opinions that are never addressed in the film) should cause us to not take these veterans with an agenda at face value.

Mike Warren is Associate Editor of the Collegiate Network publication, The Vanderbilt Torch. This article was originally featured in the March 2008 issue of The Torch.