Coming Home Isn't Easy

By RICHARD CORLISS

They joined the military into college, or out of the ghetto, or because of its seemingly studly glamour. "I saw a Marine when I was in high school," Sergeant Robert Sarra recalls in a new documentary. "And I was like, that's it! They're mean, they're tough, they got cool uniforms, and chicks dig 'em." That image barely survived through Sarra's basic training--brainwashing, he and other young men now call it. As for combat, he found it less like a Top Gun video game, shooting MiGs out of the sky, and more like Grand Theft Auto, bombing civilians crossing a Baghdad street.

Patricia Foulkrod's The Ground Truth, released in theaters last week and available on DVD next week, is both horrifying and hopeful. The first half of the film contains terrible, pulverizing footage from the Iraqi theater and testimony of atrocities that still haunt the men who saw or committed them. The second half is about the challenges these soldiers faced when they returned home, many of them with damaged bodies, most of them forced to relive their nightmares every night. One young man came back and hanged himself with a garden hose; another, fearful of demons attacking him, sleeps with a gun under his bed.

For most of the men and women appearing here, the best therapy was getting active: agitating for veterans' rights and a greater awareness of the war's human cost. And there's the hope the film leaves its viewers with. These articulate, caring young people are our best and bravest. Some of them should be in Congress, as the nagging conscience of the U.S. adventure in Iraq. Their passion makes The Ground Truth by far the finest film to emerge from the awful tangle of 9/11 and the Iraq war.