Combat Diary: The Marines of Lima Company (2006)

Everyone nods and agrees that war is brutal; rarely is that brutality glimpsed as vividly as in Combat 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 Diary combines 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 Duty makes no political statements; conservatives and liberals can read their own messages into the movie's stark, simple remembrances. But every American should watch Combat Diary and see, in the eyes of these men, what happens on the ground when a nation decides to go to war.

This is an excellent account of the limited kind of combat footage that was taken by ordinary marines. It is sad to see so many struggling now w/daily life back here in the U.S. It seems that many of these soldiers have lost what so many of us take for granted; a mind that is not scarred with the horrific images of war. Even my generation (myself included) only knows war from the images we watch, the games we play, and the movies we watch depicting war. It is so easy for us to just turn it off in our minds because we do not have friends and family that have been killed in the line of duty. It seems too often we curse the soldiers in what so many of us call a waste of life, when it isn't the individual soldiers making the decisions to be fighting in Iraq. As it has been said many times before, "Don't shoot the messenger." I would recommend this film to anyone that has any feelings about the war in Iraq, and see the individuals that are fighting for what is our continued freedom in North America. My personal feelings aside, remember that it is just normal people fighting in extraordinary times.

5% recovery record included
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