What is this documentary about? We have no game plan and I’m hoping it will take shape as we continue. Are we going to talk with vets from “both sides?” That’s the only fair thing, we’ve been told. I guess that makes sense.
In Amherst, Massachusetts we meet Kevin, purely by accident. He tells us of a very different kind of casualty of war, one that is not on any list. His son, Jeffery, came home without any visible injuries, but he was a very different person. Jeffrey was hallucinating and his behavior became increasingly erratic. He spoke of terrible things that happened in Iraq. He asked to sit in his father’s lap one evening. The next day, Kevin found his son’s body in the basement—he’d hung himself. “He looked peaceful for the first time in months,” Kevin told us.
Tears stream down our faces and I can’t recall being so moved. Kevin tells us that they later learned, from Jeff’s therapist, that the dog tags he wore around his neck had belonged to two unarmed Iraqi men he was ordered to shoot. “He wore them, not as trophies, but to honor those men he knew he was responsible for,” Kevin tells us.
We now know that we don’t have an ordinary documentary on our hands, with the filmmaker’s viewpoint dominating via the omnipresent narrator. People simply need to hear what these vets and their families have gone through, in their own words, and nothing else.
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