The Ground Truth

The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends shows a recruiting day at Venice Beach in California, a Marine boot camp in 2002, just months prior to the Iraq Invasion, scenes from combat in Iraq, and interviews with returning soldiers and their families.

At one point in the movie, the film’s producers reproduce footage from behind an airborne camera (in a drone perhaps?) showing the distant ground images of maybe 20 or more Iraqis walking through a street intersection.  You hear a spoken order to destroy these people and then a countdown to the launch of a missile.  You see a big explosion that destroys all of the Iraqis.  Then you hear the voice of a young white male, one of the military personnel involved in the attack.  He says “Dude.”  He says it in a very awestruck way.  It’s like a video game, he knows, but this time it’s real.  Those were actual flesh and blood human beings he just eliminated with the flick of a switch.

http://blogs.zmag.org/node/2873

http://thegroundtruth.org/soldiers.html