Effects of Killing Examined in Ground Truth

The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends is a heavy and unhappy documentary but still one highly relevant even beyond recent current events. The film takes a close look at what causes and the subsequent results of combat trauma, doing so by way of looking at the peculiarities inherent to the war in Iraq.

The disentanglement of that psychology in regards to the Iraq war specifically isn’t always easy, and despite the apolitical voice writer/director Patricia Foulkrod gives the film her subjects push it strongly towards an activist point of view. It’s not really possible to separate the stories from the message and in that respect The Ground Truth is somewhat muddled in its criticism of the war. More accurately, it is a criticism of the military’s philosophy on training; using, and then ultimately discarding, soldiers after they are physically or mentally injured.

Recruiters for the armed forces do not advertise by saying that, after signing up, a person can meet interesting and stimulating peoples of ancient cultures and then kill them. Fair enough, as any good salesman hypes the positive and downplays the negative. But killing is what the military does, and based on examining Army training manuals and watching commercials one might conclude the military was engaged in a deep and widespread denial of death, almost as if it didn’t happen at all. That discrepancy between this shadow and the actual persona is considered duplicitous rather, than what a PR representative might term, “puffery.” As a fully one-sided documentary, there is no balance to an issue like recruiting practices, and this is The Ground Truth’s weakest link.

That’s only the beginning though, as the meat of this documentary is how combat experience affects soldiers after they return. Foulkrod doesn’t so much tell that story as allow it to be told by veterans themselves, many of whom are more disturbed by what they did then what was done to them. One soldier describes a time when he sighted a woman walking up to a tank crew who he shot because of the risk of a suicide bomb. After shooting her, he found that she had been reaching for a white handkerchief and this is the point where he, “lost it.”

The dehumanization that goes on in basic training does appear to work well, but is supposed to apply only to enemy combatants. The increasing frustration these soldiers describe of being forced into positions where they harm innocents, compounded by the lack of a coherent objective, makes them edgy and guilt-prone. Soldiers come back from service to find that “Support Our Troops” really meant “Support the War,” and almost all describe a consistent and significant anger. They aren’t spat upon or yelled at, but they are labeled with personality disorders by the Department of Defense so that a diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can be avoided and benefits denied.

There is no doubt that The Ground Truth is a bitter pill. There’s truth in it to be sure, but Foulkrod’s thesis appears to be that the military promises to make its men and women into better people (more confident, sharper, etc.) but instead leaving them used up both mentally and physically. That argument requires two sides before we can come out with a conclusion and call it “truth,” and the relevance of her theme is one largely unexamined in the film. To reject it without careful examination would be to continue to give soldiers the short shrift, and regardless of political affiliation and, as The Ground Truth all but states, that is not acceptable.

Note: The Ground Truth received the Boston Film Festival's Best Documentary Award.

Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)