The Ground Truth tells the story of a few veterans who came away from the Iraq War very discontented, mentally disturbed or psychologically damaged in some major way. The stories reflected in the movie are real, but the packaging is designed to bias people into thinking that everything about the war is bad, which is simply not true. Many people are killed, maimed and injured – that is the case in every war (I am one of the veterans in question.) Many bad decisions are made and many lives are ruined when wars are fought, invasions launched and weapons brought to bear. But not every veteran walks away from war as disturbed in the head as the people portrayed here.
The Ground Truth is sobering, realistic and flawed, because it only shows one third of the picture. That is OK, as long as the viewer understands going in that the movie is slanted towards convincing people of how awful and wrong the entire thing is by making showing all the bad and none of the good. We should all know that war does bad things to the people who participate in it, and that sometimes the living suffer more than the dead, or at least longer. We should also know that in wars, human beings commit some of the greatest acts of selflessness that have ever been displayed. Those stories are not told here.