Promoted by Steven D

Guardian has a new video linked on their front page, that covers events on and after May 19, 2007.  It’s a Flash 8 and takes a minute or two to load.

The Guardian’s award-winning photographer and filmmaker Sean Smith spent two months embedded with US troops in Baghdad and Anbar province. His harrowing documentary exposes the exhaustion and disillusionment of the soldiers.

I’m not going to try to describe the whole thing.  Instead, I’ve transcribed the comments of two soldiers.

Spc. Lake 4th Platoon Apache Company Strykers:  It’s a joke.  We’ve spent — we’ll have spent fourteen months in combat.  Basically.  Fighting all fourteen months.  They sent us right into Baghdad.  When we got into Iraq we came right to Baghdad.  Our battalion.  We got right to Baghdad.  We took our first two KIAs the first week we were here.  The first week we were in Baghdad we lost two guys in our battalion.  And then, I mean it hasn’t stopped since.

Spc. Lake 4th Platoon Apache Company Strykers: You got grenades going off.  You got an IED blowing up your vehicle.  And then you’re, then you’re expected to go back in those four to six, four to five hours and get, and relax, to come back out and do another six hours.  You don’t have time — you just don’t have time to do it.  Your body never gets to come down.  You’re always on that higher, heightened sense of alertness, like you just don’t have the, you don’t have the rest.  The comfort zone, I guess you could call it, to where when you know you’re back on the fob [forward operating base] you can, you know, you can relax and let loose.  You just don’t have time.  We’re not given that, that time to, to recuperate from being out there for six hours and dealing with that, to go back out and deal with another six hours.  It’s just constant.  You never get a break.

Spc. Vassell, 2nd Platoon Apache Company Strykers: I challenge anybody in Congress to do my rotation.  They don’t have to do anything, just come hang out with me and go home at the times I go home.  And come stay here fifteen months with me.

Spc. Vassell, 2nd Platoon Apache Company Strykers:  We’re supposed to be on the way home right now.  We were supposed to be flying home in six days.  Six days.  But because we have people up there in Congress with the brain of a two-year old who don’t know what they’re doing.  They don’t experience it.  I, I challenge the President or whoever has us here for fifteen months to ride along, alongside me.  I’ll do another fifteen months if he comes out here and rides along with me every day for fifteen months.  I’ll do fifteen more months.  They don’t even have to pay me extra.  I just want him to come out here and ride with me another fifteen months.

Crossposted at Daily Kos and Never In Our Names.