Combat Diary - The Marines of Lima Company
Everyone nods and agrees that war is brutal; rarely is that brutality glimpsed as vividly as inCombat Diary - The Marines of Lima Company. During their 2005 tour of duty in Iraq, Lima Company--a unit of Marines, all from Ohio--lost 23 men on the front lines.Combat Diarycombines footage shot by the Marines themselves with home digital cameras and interviews with many of the surviving soldiers and parents and wives of men who died. The soldier's footage ranges from bored hijinks to actual firefights, including a troubling, surreal scene of men in full gear with rifles ready patrolling through a crowded Iraqi bazaar. In frank, uncensored language, the men describe how excitement turns to terror and misery, how their friends were shot or set on fire; but even before these jolting stories are told, the price of war can be heard in their voices and seen in their faces.  This, combined with interviews with a mother who's kept an answering machine message from her dead son and with a wife who was pregnant with her second child when she learned her husband had been killed, creates a potent documentary.Combat Dutymakes no political statements; conservatives and liberals can read their own messages into the movie's stark, simple remembrances. But every American should watchCombat Diaryand see, in the eyes of these men, what happens on the ground when a nation decides to go to war.--Bret Fetzer