Thursday, September 21, 2006

The Mind, Blown

Long-time readers of Simply Left Behind will recall I have a fascination with the destructive power on war on the survivors.

As an actor and student of the human psyche, I'm always interested in learning how people deal with extreme situations: stress, violence, tragedy. So in this week's Time comes an article about Iraq war veterans, and a movie that exposes some of their trauma:
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.
I'd quote more, but the article is very short.

If this movie is playing near you, I urge you to see it (I might get the chance in the next couple of weeks). I can almost guarantee that it's on my queue at Netflix next week.