WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

Palm Springs International Film Festival Commentary One:
The Ground Truth—After the Killing Ends

(Transcript)
Originally broadcast January 12, 2007

	Milos Stehlik

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The Palm Springs International Film Festival is the first major film festival of the year—it starts shortly after the New Year. Now in its 18th year, this year is larger and bigger than ever, with over 200 films screening over 12 days. One of the features which makes the festival unique is that it shows virtually all of the Best Foreign Language Picture and Documentary Feature nominees for the Academy Awards.

The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends is one of the nominees for Best Documentary.

The Ground Truth is the first film by Patricia Foulkrod, and focuses on one of the shameful secrets of the American war in Iraq. It is not a particularly well-made film. It meanders, often lacks focus, and has a particularly irritating Muzak-like score. But much of its content is extraordinarily powerful, all the more so because the voices of the soldiers—the kids often recruited with the silver-lined dreams of military recruiters—have been glaringly absent from public discourse about the war in Iraq.

Foulkrod follows the soldiers from their recruitment to their return from Iraq. There is the stirring ceremony with tears in the eyes of the mothers as the recruits swear allegiance to defend the constitution. There is the well-oiled military machine which disorients them, dehumanizes them and turns them into aggressive killers. And then there is the real-life experience of being shipped into the midst of a complicated and difficult war in which they have a hard time identifying the enemy.

Told largely in the voices and from the perspectives of the soldiers, it is a terrifying and tragic story. There is the lack of protective equipment—humvees in which the soldiers are left exposed. Most of all, there is confusion. The American soldiers have been taught to regard the Iraqis with the derogatory term of hajjis. How to tell the good guys from the bad guys? As one soldier explains, when the soldiers are receiving fire from a certain direction and one insurgent is doing the shooting, how to react? The soldiers are trained to carpet the whole area with gunfire. Innocent bystanders and civilians are caught in the fire. The mission is accomplished. The firing on the soldiers stops. But innocent people are also dead.

The soldiers face moral and ethical issues which are overwhelmingly stressful, forced to make life-and-death decisions in split seconds. One of the soldiers in the film tells of a woman approaching a checkpoint. The American soldiers waved and shouted for her to top. She reached into her burka. He fired a warning shot, which missed, but the rest of his company opened fire and she fell tothe ground, dead. As she fell, in her hand she held a white flag she was retrieving from her purse.

It is the stress of watching innocents die or dead which eventually has its toll on the soldiers when they return. Many of those telling their stories in the film are injured. Flak jackets, explains an expert, protect the core of the body. Nothing protects the soldiers’ extremities. Beyond the physical damage, there is the psychological damage. The soldiers can’t communicate. They are full of nightmares, hostilities, anger. Many suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder— PTSD.

The story in the film shifts to the military’s response which seems to want to sweep the soldiers’ sometimes severe psychological problems under the rug. There are stories of suicides—the 23-year old California soldier who hanged himself in the basement next to the garden hose,, Another veteran fought for the custody of his daughter. One night, he called home and got the babysitter who told him his daughter was asleep. He asked the babysitter to tell his daughter he loved her. Later, he blew his brains out.

The military, says one vet in the film, has turned a deaf ear to many of these problems. A returning soldier is asked if he has PTSD before returning from Iraq. If he answers yes, he is KEPT in Iraq. Those who return the U.S. mainland are given a choice of remaining on the base for treatment, or going home to their families. A time limit is now placed on how long veterans have to report psychological problems. Others tell of a system which tries to classify their problems as pre-existing mental illness rather than post-traumatic stress brought back home from the war.

The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends is a legacy of the war in Iraq which we have not yet begun to face.

This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s “Worldview” from the Palm Springs International Film Festival in Palm Springs, California.

“Worldview” film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

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