(2009) Producer/editor/director Ava Lowrey interviewed three Iraq-war veterans for her 51-minute documentary, contrasting their views from direct participation as boots on the ground in Operation Iraqi Freedom with video clips of President Bush and his administration attempting to justify and reassure the American public of the necessity and rightness of the war.

Twenty-year veteran of the Tennessee Army National Guard, Staff Sgt James C. Bailey, joining out of high school in 1988, made the first of his three tours to Iraq in October 1990. Going back in 2005 to Diyala province, he asked himself: "What am I fighting for?" He says he didn't approve of the invasion of 2003, pulling resources out of Afghanistan, nor believe the hype over weapons of mass destruction; Iraq had nothing to do with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The war was the result of the president's "personal agenda."

Enlisting in early 2003 at seventeen with visions of himself as GI Joe fighting in a glamorous battle for freedom, Cpl Michael Prysner, accepting whatever his superiors told him was true about Iraq (such as existence of WMD), served with military intelligence in northern Iraq from March 2003 until February 2004 among the Kurdish population; but he and others were assigned to other aggravating tasks. His unit was ordered to evict families from their homes, kicking in doors and dragging women and children out into the street with nowhere else to go when they refused to leave voluntarily: "Didn't fit my view of liberation or freedom."

At least 54% of US deaths in Iraq have happened to young people under 25 years of age.

Raised in a family with a tradition of military service ("only life I knew"), Staff Sgt Charlie Carlson, also a veteran of Desert Storm, returned to Iraq in March 2003 where he experienced ambushes and removing pieces of bodies from the rubble of the bombed UN building.

Initially most of the media were complicit in selling the war to the public, surrendering their objectivity and critical responsibilities to the administration's propagandizing. Prysner remarks on the lack of reporting on the daily violence he witnessed; Kobe Bryant's scandal captured more of the public's attention. Civil war and tribal conflict were unleashed when Saddam Hussein was deposed; Iraqis, scared of American soldiers, often only pretended to be friendly, becoming foes of the occupation when opportunities presented themselves.

While neither Bailey nor Carlson says he had serious difficulties adjusting to being home, Prysner, at age 24, admits he's "scared to be home alone." Retired from the Guard but unemployed as a civilian, Bailey believes we should just "let go and leave" because "It's never going to be won" in contrast to Carlson's assertion: "I think we won the war."

Other than leaving, Bailey answers Lowrey's question: "I have no favorite memory of being in Iraq." Prysner, active in Iraq Veterans Against the War and a 2008 participant in Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan, concurs. Though he recalls providing orphaned children with toys, Carlson, whose letters and e-mails from Iraq were published in Sanford, Florida's Seminole Herald as "The Iraqi Diaries," after being investigated for his critical comments about President Bush and subsequently demoted to sergeant after 14 years of service with a six-month suspension of pay, is no longer a member of the military.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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