A moving documentary about US veterans haunted by traumatic memories from the battlefield and a therapist’s attempts to help them.
Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, has made life hell for 30 percent of the 834,467 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who have received treatment through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. In this harrowing installment of the POV series on PBS, filmmaker Laurent Becue-Renard focuses on the harrowing experiences of veterans and their families as they struggle to put their lives back together.
Fred Guzman, a California-based therapist and social worker, headed up post-traumatic stress disorder programs at the Veterans Administration in the late 1970s before opening The Pathway Home, a treatment center in Yountville, California, in 2008. In the vivid and emotionally raw footage captured during group therapy, we see veterans talk about what happened to them in war zones:
One young man describes killing a man who was only 25 meters away; he doesn’t know if the man was actually an enemy or just a guy “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
A soldier describes riding in a truck that hit a child and wonders what he would have done if he had been driving.
A soldier describes the death of the boy next to him in combat.
The soldier describes the nightmare of handling a truckload of bodies and how, in order to keep his sanity, he had to stop seeing them as people with friends, wives, and children.
Guzman argues that for these veterans with PTSD, returning to civilian life is not what they thought it would be. Wives and children often don’t recognize these angry, addicted or violent young men who are haunted by nightmares and panic attacks.
The war is still raging inside these veterans, and our hearts go out to them and their loved ones as they strive to think positively, forgive themselves, and change their shattered and closed lives.
