What I Want You To Know

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[pensive music] -People join the military for all sorts of reasons: educational benefits, new job skills, family tradition.

But defending your country always seems to be a part of it.

-I was in high school when 9/11 happened, so I think there was a sense of patriotism.

I wanted to do something that was pro-America.

If I was going to go into the military, I didn't want to be hanging back on the edges.

If we were going to go to war, I wanted to be in the middle of it.

-I did want to serve my country.

I wanted to do my bit.

I was very proud to be a soldier.

[rapid gunfire, pensive music continues] -I used to say it was kind of like a dystopia.

Up is down, down is up.

We're told we're fighting this mission for these reasons.

We don't see it on the ground.

-Three quarters of the officers that I served with at my level were, at least by the end of our Iraq deployment, feeling wildly and profoundly hopeless regarding the mission.

[rapid shots] -Life and blood was wasted.

It feels like I'm repeating what a generation ago did in Vietnam.

-People look at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If you ask any American on the street, "Was that a success or failure?"

you'd be hard to find someone who says, "Yes, those are successful."

This is a failure that now we're associated with.

That's difficult to deal with.

[pensive music continues] -We should've done things differently.

I wasn't in any rooms where the final decision was made, but I'm living with the results.

And thousands are.

Millions are.

[pensive music swells with emotion] [music fades] PRES.

GEORGE W. BUSH: Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, [dark, dramatic music] our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.

Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror.

The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger.

[dark, dramatic music continues] On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against Al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

[dark, dramatic music softens] -From the moment I joined, I specifically chose a position in the Army I knew was a combat role.

I very much wanted to go to Afghanistan.

I wanted to be a part of what I consider to be a justified reaction to the terrorist attacks.

Once the war started and the towers came down in my city, right, New York, what I wanted was to go fight.

Once I was at West Point, and once I was in the military, I chose a combat arms job because what I was seeking was combat.

My whole objective was to show force to the enemy and let them know that the world will not put up with their... issues.

BUSH: In four short months, our nation has comforted the victims, begun to rebuild New York and the Pentagon, rallied a great coalition, captured, arrested, and rid the world of thousands of terrorists, destroyed Afghanistan's terrorist training camps, saved a people from starvation, and freed a country from brutal oppression.

[rousing applause] -In 2010, we knew that the insurgency was still strong there, they're doing terrible things to the population, and we were going there to, to continue to protect them, to try to build the infrastructure, you know, export democracy there.

Um, so people still felt good about it.

It seemed like a very clear-cut mission to me at that time, that we're helping the people of Afghanistan.

That we're destroying an evil regime and rooting out Al-Qaeda, an actual terrorist organization.

[dark, dramatic music returns] SECRETARY POWELL: We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction.

He's determined to make more.

Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option.

Not in a post-September 11th world.

-I definitely trusted Colin Powell.

I was fully convinced that there was the ability for Saddam Hussein to use weapons of mass destruction against the US.

President Bush was our commencement speaker that year, and it was known as the Bush doctrine.

You know, we're going to go after the enemy.

We're not going to wait for them to come to us was a thing.

PRES.

GEORGE W. BUSH: And our security require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.

BALL: So we knew we were going to go after the enemy.

Iraq was our enemy.

Afghanistan was our enemy.

FEINBERG: And I had a sense of, kind of a sense of patriotism that my leaders weren't going to lie to me, and that they also took a lot of responsibility for where they were sending our military to.

People die when they go to war.

I had a sense that they would only go to war if it was absolutely necessary.

BUSH: On my orders, Coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war.

[huge blast] -When I enlisted, I knew I would be sent to Iraq, and we hadn't found weapons of mass destruction yet.

But I believed that we'd be helping the Iraqi people.

My mindset was wanting to do it to fulfill the mission, as we were told, to make Iraq safe for democracy, to create a secure environment over there, to protect the vulnerable people over there.

And I wanted to do that and achieve that mission at that time.

[music fades] [long, deep blare like a foghorn] SOLDIER: Very good.

-High five?

BALL: My unit was in Baghdad, and we had a neighborhood that we patrolled.

And it was always very positive interactions with the local citizens.

[woman speaks in Arabic] BALL: There was one time that we were out on patrol, and a man, we were going through the neighborhood, and he came up to us in English and was like, "Why are you here?

We didn't ask you to be here.

We don't want you here."

And that was the first time that it was verbalized to me.

Now, that was my experience.

And I'm sure that, you know, others had varying levels of experience.

But we always felt welcome by the folks that we interacted with until that one time.

And I think that was a moment for me to really begin questioning, because here and there, like, oh, you know, this is, this is kind of crazy that we're here and that we're doing this.

And it doesn't necessarily seem to be... working.

[tender music] FURLONG: Where I was in Afghanistan, the folks were not happy to see us.

They know you're there to fight a war.

For the most part, the people there just wanted to live their lives, farm their land, build a family, and try to be what we want, which is relatively happy in life.

Which when you have an occupying force come in that's specifically coming to fight a war, they're not going to feel very happy about it.

-Just our trip from Kuwait, Camp Wolverine to our Forward Operating Base, Scunion, outside of Baqubah, Iraq, we encountered IEDs, ambushes.

We would get contact from small arms like a AK-47, and we would stop the trucks and just orientate all these heavy weapons and blast the [silenced] out of the entire area where that AK-47 was coming from.

And these are mostly all urban areas.

So right away, I was seeing collateral damage, and I just couldn't believe that this is the way we were going to fight this, this war.

Almost that first day, I realized, like, this is going to be ongoing for a long time.

There's things here that cannot be solved, not only in a year, but maybe never.

[soldiers call out] -Hold your fire.

[quiet, tense music] [blast, rocks and asphalt crashing] [soldiers scream] SJURSEN: Day to day, it was driving in circles, hoping a bomb didn't go off, knowing a bomb would go off, and then picking up the pieces, quite literally, of the soldiers that you loved and that you grew to love through years of training and combat.

That was life in Iraq, regardless of what mission we were told we were there to do.

-The amount of insurgency that was going on, that's hard to believe that they wanted us there.

There's so many IEDs getting blown up on us on a daily basis.

That's a hard pill to swallow that you're sending my battalion at 850 people... to look for bombs to get blown up by them.

[crash, grunt] [rocks splatter] [nearby soldiers yelling] [man down grunts and groans] REPPENHAGEN: We are first to respond to a truck that got hit by an IED.

Two women soldiers were inside... both missing their faces.

Basically, just this IED just blew up the entire front cab of this, of this HEMTT vehicle.

FURLONG: In my area of operations, we were seeing probably around a dozen to a couple dozen IEDs a week.

And we were either locating them, you know, seeing them ahead of time and calling out EOD to control detonate them, or an insurgent was detonating that IED remotely.

Or unfortunately, some folks are stepping on some sort of pressure plate, and that's setting off an IED.

Um, so... uh, when you think about it, at some point, you're going to be within that blast radius.

You're going to be hit by that IED.

That blast wave is going to affect you.

[ominous music builds, punctuated by blast] [ominous music fades] Each time the Taliban would come shoot at us, we'd have to go into the town and make it a wreck.

You keep repeatedly going through somebody's houses enough times, you know, you're probably going to make them the enemy.

WEINER: You'd raid the home.

We'd be trampling all the crops, killing the animals, ransacking the inside, looking for, you know, evidence of terrorist or insurgent activity.

[soldier yells in Arabic] WEINER: We came to understand that just because our intelligence shop said or thought that somebody was an insurgent, did not mean that they were, that they would often get tips from people.

Neighbors didn't like each other, this kind of thing.

The process to ensure that you were only raiding and nabbing the real bad guys was just riddled with error.

When you raid the home and you zip cuff the males and you bring them out, and now they're going off to some prison and the whole family's crying, and the women are, you know, beating at you and crying, when you do that over and over and over again, maybe it's the actual bad guy that they said.

Chances are just as good and if not better in some cases, that you just created an insurgent or an insurgent family, or that that family's never going to see that person again.

SOLDIER: On your [silenced] face!

-You're told there's bad guys in the house, high-value targets, HVTs.

One example that I always go back to is we had intel that an HVT was in a house, and supposedly whatever unit had sat on the house had seen him and foreign fighters move in and out of the house.

This guy was such a high-value target, and the thinking was he had so many foreign fighters in his house that we were told if we rolled up to the house and before we dismounted and lights went on in the house, I was allowed to call in an airstrike just to basically level the house.

Well, so we get to the house, we breach the outer gate, we get to the front door and then lights in the house begin to turn on.

But at that point it's too late to call in air support.

So we just roll with the mission.

Luckily, we didn't call on air support because the guy in the house was not the high-value target we were looking for.

There was about eight women and 12 little kids.

If we would've called in an airstrike, we would've murdered uh, close to two dozen innocent civilians.

[pensive music] SJURSEN: We get ambushed.

Our first go-to to protect ourselves is to call helicopters or call bombing runs.

Well, I'm certain from the evidence that I killed civilians by mistake.

Um, that, that's, that's, that's a tough thing, um... You justify it by saying, "I helped protect my own guys."

[pensive music fades] REPPENHAGEN: Our night vision technology is not the greatest.

It's not like television.

It's white blobs when there's, there's heat, and it's hard to tell what people are holding.

We've taken out people planting roadside bombs, and we've, we've killed people changing tires on their car.

Uh, we killed a person that was pissing on the side of the road.

Um... you know, so we get it wrong.

Sometimes.

-We dropped bombs on wrong targets.

We killed civilians by accident.

Those are moments that... you kind of just have to see as a, a sort of collateral effect of war while you're out there.

I had to kind of think, like, maybe we're doing something right.

You know, maybe this person said they're glad that we're here.

We're fighting the Taliban.

We're getting rid of them.

So, hey, maybe it's worth it.

[stirring music] -I think most people just wanted to think that things were going well.

-Like, most people wanted to feel like we were there for the right reasons, and we were doing good things.

And so, they were looking for those, those, those kernels of information that supported that and, and, and weren't digging much deeper.

I think they saw those things, like, oh, here are folks kind of watching the Super Bowl or a politician delivering Thanksgiving turkey.

That was just the normal course of things to really just make it all feel normal and to show positive examples of what was happening, to complement a lot of the other hard reporting that was showing the waves of destruction.

[stirring music darkens, grows ominous] [truck engine hums] WEINER: You're driving the roads, you're patrolling, a lot of boredom.

Boom.

An IED goes off, someone's killed, or someone loses their legs.

[massive blast, a soldier yelps] Month after month, year after year, playing this cat and mouse game where they shoot mortars or blow us up with IEDs, and we, we're chasing them.

You can tell the grunts platitudes all day long, you know, "Here's our statistics.

We recovered this many IEDs, and we found this many mortars."

But what is the, what's the goal here?

What are we doing?

What's the end game?

And when people start to, you know, die from those kinds of things, um, you really start to question and think harder about, um, you know, not just, not even is this worth it?

Because it's not.

But what are we actually doing here?

[machinery rumbles] -We built some schools in the local bazaar for the kids to get a proper education, and they had teachers flown out from Kabul to go out to this remote village in Helmand Province and, and teach the kids.

And right before we left, a suicide bomber came and just killed, I think, something like 30 kids.

They blew up the schools, they killed the teachers, and they killed a few Marines that were there on patrol.

That was kind of a moment where I was like, you know... a... an "ah, [silenced]" moment, like what, what was, what was, what was it, uh, what was it worth, you know?

Would that school have gotten blown up if we hadn't built it, right?

You got to think about that.

FEINBERG: We went in with this very positive view of we are helping the Iraqi people.

We're helping get them set up to take responsibility for their country.

And so, there wasn't a sense that, that they hated us or wanted us out.

But during one of our first convoys, we had a child actually throw a grenade at one of our trucks and blow up the front of it.

It opened my eyes to the fact that these people do not want us here, which made me question somewhat of our mission there.

But it also created a lot of backlash within our unit.

That created a spiral of, like, how do we serve this country?

How do we help them set up their own government if we don't even like these people, if we don't have respect for them?

And I think there was, um, very little respect for the Iraqi people, um, throughout, um, the units in the military that I served with.

[many voices] Right here.

Right here.

Let's go!

CUEVA: In the beginning, there was a hope that maybe there was some weapons of mass destruction.

There was a hope that we're going to stabilize this government.

But then as time progresses, you realize that that's not something that they want.

The mission wasn't of any importance to me.

The mission was my friends, my soldiers, my company, my battalion.

REPPENHAGEN: Our mission didn't make any sense.

The things that we were doing were pretty much just to stay alive, especially my missions to stop people from planting IEDs and shooting rockets into our base.

What part of that equates to providing stability for the Iraqi people?

None.

It's just saving our own [silenced].

[chuckles] That's all I did for a year, it felt like, is just try to stay alive and try to keep my friends alive.

[quiet conversations in Arabic, footsteps crunch on rubble] BALL: We go in to stop this tyranny, this terrorist threat that is just being cultivated in these countries.

And that's kind of what we're being told.

If they have democracy, they won't want to do these things uh, to one another or project, you know, endanger us, you know, our way of life.

HORGAN: So I got there in September of 2005, and the first elections were like a month later.

It felt like a really important mission to help with the security of that.

But where we were in the Al Anbar province, like, voted overwhelmingly against the Constitution.

And so, it was the first time for me to really appreciate just how divided Iraq was.

Far from just one Iraq, there's lots of different ones.

Seeing the local population basically vote against this was a pretty big light going off, like, oh wow, this is very complicated politically.

These people here don't overwhelmingly support this.

[pensive music] FURLONG: There was a nice little moniker they gave it, which was "government in a box."

Which was how can we set up different pieces of infrastructure to create democracy in these areas?

So we would go through these sort of farce elections.

In the area where I was, Marjah, we elected a mayor.

And the week that he was expected to start, he had fled the area.

And because he knew what he was getting himself into, right?

Who would, who would go into a position like that knowing that as soon as the Americans leave, I'm going to be killed because the Taliban's going to come in and get rid of me.

Even this idea of Western democracy, they had no concept of it.

Where I was it was a farming community.

People there were just trying to live their lives.

[pensive music] BALL: We have our own ideas of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Is that really what they wanted?

I don't know.

I don't know, but I know that our mission was to, to help them establish that.

And accomplishing that type of mission kind of in a vacuum, like, this is our mission, and we're going to project our mission onto you, is, is difficult to do.

Some might say impossible.

[music fades, wind whips and howls] [soldier yelling] [yelling continues, rapid gunfire] BERGMAN: The typical firefight we were in was usually the hit-and-run.

So, they'll shoot at us and then disappear into the city, into the crowds, anywhere they could find to get out.

Because they couldn't fight us straight on.

They would have to attack and then run.

And it's like fighting ghosts.

You don't ever know where these guys are going to be at.

They actually hide in with the people that are in the town, so you don't know who the enemy is.

HORGAN: We had really good intentions.

Like, we were trying to build a relationship with the locals, and we were trying to help them move on past this, this pretty crazy phase.

Their primary concern was, "How do I get my child to school in the city of Fallujah?"

It's very dangerous because the IEDs that were set for us were also capable of blowing them up, too.

And they were also scared because we were driving around with weapons.

And there's no shortages of stories where because of miscommunication or someone being scared that they're being, uh, you know, someone being shot.

[dark music] CUEVA: You come up on a intersection, and a guy comes driving at you.

[siren wails] You're telling him to stop the best you can.

You're trying to communicate the best you can in a language that you don't speak.

And, you know, he doesn't stop, so you have to shoot.

Your whole fire team shoots 50 rounds inside that vehicle.

[dark music continues, pulsing] You see your round goes right into his head, and you come over to the vehicle.

He's still alive.

Round bounces off his forehead, and you're like, oh, you know, he's just like, "I had to go to the hospital.

I'm, you know, my mother is in the hospital, and I'm just trying to go."

And you're just like, ah, [silenced].

A lot of that stuff happens, and it's not anyone's fault.

You just have a big language barrier, a big culture barrier, and that level of aggression is higher because you're in a combat zone and you have a gun.

And then it's easier to, to now you're making people hate you.

[dark music fades] We'd do like little friendly patrols.

We'd go visit a house of some person.

Talk to them what their plans are.

They tell us, "Well we're doing in this business.

We need this for fixing because you guys shelled our neighborhood."

-So they need to enlarge this shop.

-Yeah.

-Does he want to, like, knock out a wall and make it bigger?

[children clamoring, cheerful music] TOULON: We have to give out candy.

We got to give out chocolate.

We have to give a cup of Coca-Cola.

We have to be nice.

SOLDIER: Huh?

Good ice cream?

That wasn't really our job description as infantrymen though.

That's the thing.

We weren't, weren't coached on this stuff when we, when we, before we deployed.

The infantry's job mainly is to kill and to destroy the enemy.

[gunfire] You're taught to kick down doors, detain personnel, and put fire on the objective.

[rapid shooting] FURLONG: We're trying to do two things at the same time.

You're trying to do your job as a marine, which is you're trained to locate and destroy the enemy and to really escalate a situation.

But at the same time, you're also acting as an armed social worker.

So, trying to work with the local population to figure out what sort of infrastructure needs they have.

[man speaking Arabic] Sort of mediate between two warring tribes.

Um, you're, you're told to do two completely opposite things at the same time.

It was just a mess.

So just when you've reached the point where you're starting to figure things out, how to balance the combat and being a social worker, being a mediator, your deployment's over, and now the next unit's coming in.

And they're repeating all of the same mistakes that you just made.

FEINBERG: In going through the training throughout my officer training in the Marine Corps there was a huge focus on the need to win hearts and minds.

SOLDIER: Salam alaykum.

BALL: How do you change someone's heart and mind when they're afraid because you're walking around in all this body armor, and you've got a rifle or a sidearm?

I would feel like I don't really have a choice.

I've got to follow along with what you're telling me to do, whether I want to or not, or I'm not going to make it out of here.

I'm going to be angry.

I might not verbalize that, but that's going to be in my mind, and it's going to be in my heart.

And when I become 18, 19, whose side am I going to be on?

FEINBERG: When I joined the Marine Corps, when I went to Iraq, I felt like what I was doing was protecting America.

Once I was in country and I saw how we were perceived on the ground, it made me wonder if we were actually making our country less safe.

[explosion] Were we creating more reasons for people to attack America because of what we were doing on the ground?

[blasts] WEINER: There were times when people would get blown up or killed, and you really come to, to hate them.

It got to a point where as we were manning like a traffic control point or hitting a house, people's frustration boiled over.

People started to become a little rougher, uh, more violent with the local population.

The third time that my lieutenant got blown up when I was on the, um, the 50-cal, um, you know, I turned it and would've just started shooting all of them if my sergeant hadn't been screaming at me not to do it, so.

[somber music, voice over walkie-talkie] [beep] -All right.

One individual just stood up.

[beep] -We have eyes on him.

We have eyes on him.

-All right.

He's sneaking out to the road?

-Looks like he's tiptoeing out to the road, sneaking.

Now he's down in a hole again.

BALL: We didn't learn the lessons from Vietnam that, when you're fighting a force that has these strong beliefs, they don't follow the traditional combat way of fighting that we're used to.

It's difficult, if not impossible to, to, to fight them.

[solemn music] HORGAN: The odds are definitely stacked against the occupying force for all types of reasons.

Because we're not culturally kind of conversant.

We don't know the lands.

You know, we're going to leave eventually.

Like, we're not as invested, and time is not on our side.

There's a political angle to it.

There's a perception angle.

Whereas the man on the ground, the insurgent, doesn't care about any of those things.

They're fighting for, for their family, for their honor, and they're fueled by different things.

And it's very hard to fight against that.

Like, it's just a losing battle.

[massive blast] [blast roars] BALL: More and more, it just seemed like, wow, do we know what we're doing?

Like, and if we know what we're doing, why isn't it working?

And since it's not working, why are we still continuing to try?

I knew that if I stayed in the Army, I'd probably end up in Iraq again, and we'd still be going through these same types of motions, trying to change hearts and minds and get rid of these insurgents.

But they'd still be there, and it just seemed like it, it was going to continue.

Forever.

[haunting music] FEINBERG: I had to set a lot of my doubts aside to do the job at the time when I was in Iraq.

I think I had a lot more of those doubts coming home.

I wasn't afraid of going to Afghanistan, but I was afraid of being in a position where I was leading Marines, and I couldn't tell them what the mission was.

And that's what ultimately led me to get out of the Marine Corps.

If I can't explain to someone why it's worth them putting their life on the line, then I can't lead that mission.

LAGOZE: I don't think that government officials and State Department and Department of Defense officials actually thought this was going to work.

I just think it was a process that got started, and they didn't know how to finish.

They just didn't know how to stop it.

And we basically meandered along this path for 20 years.

There's a lot of money involved in war.

Um, I don't think it's all about money.

I think that, um, it's a huge part of it, though.

And I think once that ball gets rolling, once that war machine gets rolling, there's, there's no way to stop it.

The same thing happened Iraq the same thing we did in Vietnam.

[haunting music fades] [chilling music] SJURSEN: Child sexual abuse, right?

I mean, child rape is a cultural reality, particularly where I was in rural southwestern Kandahar province, okay.

And in lots of parts of Afghanistan.

It is a well-known sort of dirty secret, below-the-surface fact among soldiers that this goes on, and everyone's got their own story about what they saw or what they heard.

BERGMAN: We went into a house, just a basic patrol.

And when I walked in the house... I walked in to an elder with a young boy... [unsettling music] sexually molesting him.

And that broke my heart.

[unsettling music continues] Yeah, I tried to say something to the command about it.

It was basically blown off like that's none of our business... and we shouldn't worry about that.

[unsettling music continues] [unsettling music fades] FURLONG: It wasn't just the elders.

It was the Afghan army.

It was the Afghan police officers.

And the people were angry that the government was allowing this to happen.

The US position was that this is an Afghan problem, and it's not our job to interfere with the cultural aspects.

As someone who's serving there, and you see these, these different human rights abuses, children being sexually abused, and you're being told to ignore it, it really counteracts this idea that I think a lot of people have that we're there to, to provide, you know, human rights to the people of Afghanistan.

And that is just not what was happening.

HORGAN: We would've been nothing in Iraq if it wasn't for our translators and the other folks that were supporting us, not just in speaking the language, but for engaging with the culture.

These are folks who are patrolling with us, doing things as dangerous as we are doing.

They don't get to go back to the United States at the end of the deployments.

They go back to the local community.

So they have arguably a very, like a very difficult job.

And we made a commitment that they would get these visas and would come here, and we've basically just saddled them with bureaucracy.

It took way too long to get people out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and many were killed while waiting for visas.

It is a betrayal because no one's ever going to trust us or should trust us if we don't come through on that one.

All these guys gave a lot.

They fought side by side with us, put themselves at risk.

And to be left behind like that or people can't find their paperwork, everything could've gone wrong.

That's the one thing we should never have failed at.

HORGAN: In our final hours, like the final memories, I think, for some people, as they think about our role in a conflict like Afghanistan, is to leave the people that supported us the most, like, you know, high and dry.

And that just feels, like, very dishonorable, which is, again, which is completely counter to everything we learned in the military.

[dark, eerie music] FURLONG: During the war in Afghanistan, the American public was told that we're making a lot of progress.

The Afghan partners we were serving with were doing a great job, and they would be able to take over once the US left.

But if things were really going our way, you know, if that narrative was true, then why were we fighting there for 20 years?

The Afghanistan Papers were published by The Washington Post.

That was the opportunity for the American public to really see and hear what was going on in Afghanistan.

[somber music] FEINBERG: What was shocking about The Afghanistan Papers was how similar it was to The Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War.

And for Americans to have gone through the Vietnam War, our leaders lied to us at that time, too.

And just 30, 40 years later, we're in this type of situation again where we're letting generals lie to the public, politicians lie to the public about how war is going.

It's amazing that more people didn't question that.

Anyone who joins the Marine Corps or the military is demonstrating a willingness to sacrifice their life for their country.

I think our politicians and our military leaders have a responsibility to, at a minimum, tell the truth about what people are actually getting into.

HORGAN: The part I struggle with is knowing that there's good people in there and not knowing who they are.

And like, if you hear especially like folks in leadership roles that you looked up to in the past, and it's like kind of what side where you on?

Were you the one really trying to uplift our values and were willing to speak about them courageously, or were you just kind of playing this political game?

And that's the hard part.

It just makes you just not trust.

[haunting music] REPPENHAGEN: We didn't find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

We learned that the 9/11 connections to Iraq were false.

Our military-industrial complex is doing better than ever.

My friends and I were sacrificing and dying, and I was killing people.

I was physically injured.

I was mentally injured.

I lost my sanity.

I lost my innocence.

I lost my soul.

For what?

I was sent there... on a fraud.

BALL: The military teaches you to make the difficult right decision instead of the easy wrong decision.

As a young person, I thought that we were doing the noble thing, doing the right thing all the time.

And to know that senior leaders... chose not to live by those values and still continue to choose not to live by those values, it's hypocrisy.

[melancholy music] FEINBERG: We talk a lot about the 7,000 lives lost of American military, and the tens of thousands of those who lost limbs and who were injured.

But what we don't talk about is the hundreds of thousands of civilians who we accidentally killed, um, uh... during our time there.

LAGOZE: The military paints this illusion that it's like a very precise and very well-tuned and well-oiled machine and only makes mistakes occasionally.

It's bull- [silenced].

Mistakes are made all the time.

Way more than it's reported.

Take drone strikes for, for an example, right?

You have guys that are in a trailer in Nevada in the desert somewhere, and they are watching one guy for weeks on end deciding if he is quote-unquote "a bad guy."

If you can follow that person for multiple weeks and still get it wrong, then what does that tell you?

What does that tell you about our understanding of who the enemy is, of who we're killing, who we're supposed to be killing?

[aching music] [aching music fades] REPPENHAGEN: When we got to our base, we had about a month of what's called right seat rides with the outgoing unit.

They would split up their forces and we'd split up ours, and we'd go half theirs, half ours out on mission.

Yeah, I mean, we watched them indiscriminately kill people who were out after curfew.

People that look like they might've been holding a weapon, even if it was a, a farming instrument.

The reaction to improvised explosive devices was just to porcupine and shoot everything and anybody nearby.

You might be facing an enemy combatant that's hidden with civilians, but you can't kill those civilians just because of that fact.

Or else how the hell do you come home and feel any sort of honor in what you did?

That's kind of how I always saw it.

But when you're there and you're confronted by the realities, and you have shifting rules of engagement every day, and really, you're surrounded by other teenagers with automatic weapons, that's the reaction that, that people have.

And it's hard to just walk that back.

Um... and then when you see your friends being shot and hurt and killed, you, you know, you, you only join in.

[solemn music] WEINER: Nobody knows exactly how many civilians died as a result of these wars.

But there are some good estimates, and they're in the hundreds of thousands.

[solemn music continues] A lot of Iraqi civilians were killed in the sectarian violence.

Some were killed by us.

Some died because the infrastructure in the country was totally demolished.

And so, it was many more times that ever died under Saddam.

Before we went over there, part of the reason, the justification, big reason, was, "Look how Saddam's killing his own people."

It's a terrible thing.

But if we're going over there to try to stop that or prevent that, um, is it worth it if two or three or four times the amount of people that ever died under him were killed as a result of the invasion?

Doesn't seem to make too much sense to me.

[solemn music fades] -[on walkie-talkie] Bushmaster Crazy Horse, we have individuals going to the scene.

Looks like possibly picking up bodies and weapons.

-[on walkie-talkie] Hey, we need to stop that when you get down there.

-Can I shoot?

-You see my little [beep-beep] -Roger.

Break.

Crazy Horse One eight, request permission to engage.

Picking up the wounded.

PITTS: The rules of engagement, when I was there early in my deployment were pretty lax.

You were expected to return fire or fire first and then figure out afterwards if the people you had killed either deserved or didn't deserve to be killed.

-[on walkie-talkie] It's Bushmaster 7.

Go ahead.

-Roger, we have a black SUV or a Bongo truck picking up the bodies.

-[silenced]!

-Request permission to engage.

-Bushmaster 7, Roger.

This is Bushmaster 7, Roger.

Engage.

-One eight, engage.

Clear.

Come on!

[rapid gunfire] -Clear.

[gunfire resumes] Clear.

[gun fires] PITTS: I can't count how many times I've seen... women and children shot at or shot who didn't, they were just there.

Um, and folks just rolled through, and anything that moved, they fired at.

[rapid volley of gunfire] -Yeah, [silenced]!

You're [silenced] gone!

[soldiers yelp] -Dude, look it!

We [silenced] those people all to [silenced] down there.

-Dude!

[laughs] Dude, those two people -Who pulled up in the white car!

-I [silenced] ripped them!

-I shot that dude in the white car, ran into the [silenced] building.

-Hey, hey, stay low though.

Stay low.

PITTS: Being able to turn off, like, the parts of you that would question, like, the horrible stuff that we were doing kind of gave me the ability to just be able to function, um, while on deployment.

[tender music] Once you're out of that state of mind, once you're out of country and you're back home in the States where the social-cultural norms are completely different, in America, you can't act the same way you do in deployment.

So now you have to turn those emotions back on, and then you're flooded with everything that you had boxed up in your head.

And now you have to, like, confront all the difficult things that you've been pretending weren't there for so long.

[tender music continues] You start asking yourself a lot of questions about the things you've seen, the things you've done, the things you experienced.

Um, and you start questioning yourself as, you know, you think you're a certain type of person, but then you're able to do some horrible things.

So you start to think, what type of person am I really?

Like, what are my, my morals or my ethics, that I have the ability to do the things I've done or experience the things I've experienced?

[tender music continues, footsteps crunching] CUEVA: I've never been the same since war.

I was a happy person, happy-go-lucky, telling jokes all the time.

And now I'm serious, and now I'm sad, and now I'm angry.

And now, like, I won't talk for hours, or I won't say a thing.

You know, I'll sit and be alone in a room.

And you know, everyone's like, "What's wrong with you?

What's wrong with you?"

Well, you know, I watched my friend die.

I was blown up four or five times in an explosion.

I've seen hideous things done to people in front of my eyes.

[melancholy music] Why were we in Iraq in the first place?

I have to carry this war with me for the rest of my life.

For, for, for... for nothing.

It was for nothing.

REPPENHAGEN: Some days I can forgive myself very well.

I can equate it to the societal issues and all these other socio-economic situations of why I went to Iraq, why I became a sniper, why I did all this stuff.

And then other days I refuse to give them, allow myself to have any sort of joy or happiness because I want to punish myself.

[somber music] SJURSEN: When I think about veteran suicide, I think about Smith.

Then I think about the other two fellows who served under my command, and I think about my classmates who've killed themselves.

My driver, James Smith, killed himself while we were both on leave.

I would never say why he did it, but what I do know is that his best friend in the unit, Alex Fuller, was blown into a pile of chopped meat in front of him.

I also know that he saw us kill others.

I know that James walked through dusty, smoky marketplaces with me in the aftermath of explosions.

I know that.

I know he saw the bodies of teenagers who had their hands tied behind their back in the night and were executed because they were the wrong sect of Islam.

It has been my experience that most of the suicides, at least of the combat veterans, are so intimately and inextricably linked to their experience in war that I use the term "killed by combat."

[chopper blades whir] FURLONG: If I believed that the reasons we fought this war were justified and that we weren't being lied to, then I think the sacrifices and all the things we did during deployment, uh, would be much easier to live with.

And I feel like most veterans feel that way.

[tender music] BALL: Are the Afghan people and the Iraqi people better off because we sent troops into their countries?

I don't even know what Iraq would look like if we hadn't gone over there.

The Taliban would've taken over, uh, Afghanistan like they, you know, like they did when we, when we left.

But um... I don't know that, that things would be different.

HORGAN: Did we accomplish anything good?

When you saw some of those early elections in 2005 and in 2006, especially as they were forming the first government bodies in Iraq and seeing the higher percentage of women that were participating in it, it felt like the beginning of a set of generational change in the Middle East.

But when I think about it from the cost perspective of the trillions of dollars being spent on it and the American lives, the lives of the Iraqis and others that were impacted with it, it's, there's so many other ways we could've got to the same type of change without that same cost.

FEINBERG: I am not proud of what America accomplished during those wars, and I think that we left countries much worse off than we found them.

That reduces a sense of pride that I have in being a Marine, and in having signed up during a time of war and fought during a time of war.

RECRUITS: That I will support and defend.

-The Constitution of the United States.

RECRUITS: The Constitution of the United States.

-Against all enemies.

RECRUITS: Against all enemies.

-Foreign and domestic.

RECRUITS: Foreign and domestic.

LAASER: When you join the military, you very much write a blank check to the nation saying, use me as you will.

I'm putting my rights aside.

I'm putting my liberties aside.

In very much real way, I am making myself property of the United States government.

And with that comes a lot of responsibility on the part of the citizens.

You have to do more than thank me.

Thank me through your actions, by, like, educating yourself, by voting, by taking part in the political process, by whatever.

["The Star-Spangled Banner" plays, crowd cheers] Thanks and flyovers and field-sized flags, uh, at football games, that's passive citizenship.

And I think it's passive patriotism.

And I want principled and participatory patriotism.

And I think that that requires more than thanking the troops.

[national anthem fades to somber music] WEINER: It doesn't honor veterans to say to them, "It's terrible you've got mental health issues from your deployments, but that's the price of freedom or defending your country.

And you did it, you know, for an honorable reason.

Don't despair.

Don't think it wasn't worth it."

That's not honoring veterans if, if the veteran you're talking to doesn't feel that way and doesn't feel that way because they know, uh, perfectly well what happened over there.

There are many veterans that don't want to be thanked for defending your freedom, because many of us know that's not what we actually did.

REPPENHAGEN: Service members are counting on the American public to hold the government accountable and to only send service members into war when it's for just cause.

I think as a democracy, we have that right.

I was empowered by feeling that I was representing Americans in war, that I was the tip of the spear for my society, for my neighbors.

If we're not allowed to provide that accountability over my government, then that feeling was false for me, because then all I'm representing is a handful of politicians and corporations.

[tender music] PITTS: If folks think it's unpatriotic or un-American to question our government's decisions on, you know, foreign policy or going into war, then you could call me unpatriotic or un-American.

I think it's the most patriotic thing to do, is to question your government, especially a foreign policy or a conflict where we're sending, you know, 18-year-old kids to, to die or get hurt, um.

I, I, I would hope every American citizen would question why we're doing that.

[tender music rises with emotion] Until the American public acknowledges the lies that were told to us, what actually happened on the ground, and the cost and consequences of war, then it's hard to imagine how we're not going to repeat these same mistakes.

And it's hard for me to see how, in 20 years, my children are not going to be called up to fight in the next war that did not need to happen.

[tender music continues] [music fades] [slow, thoughtful music] To order a DVD of What I Want You To Know or to find out more about this film, visit www dot what I want you to know dash film dot com.

Support for this film was made possible by more than 175 individuals.

A complete list of funders is available at www dot what I want you to know dash film dot com.