The Endless Consequences of Endless War

Soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration made the controversial decision to invade Iraq. This began a protracted and almost decade-long war in the country, resulting in the deployment of thousands of American soldiers to the region. In this extended Q&A from The Fifth Draft — the National Fellows Program newsletter — New America National Fellows Emma LeBlanc and Taylor Nagel discuss their documentary If You Can Ever Get Back which follows a group of combat medics from 2007-08 deployed to Iraq’s “Triangle of Death,” a region south of Baghdad which was home to significant combat activity and sectarian violence. Sign up for The Fifth Draft to hear how the world's best storytellers find ideas that change the world.

Your Fellows Project is the documentary film If You Can Ever Get Back, which debuted at the Portland Film Festival in 2021. Can you share the significance of its title?

During a particularly difficult, candid reflection on PTSD and suicide, Robert Brady, one of the film’s three main subjects, was describing the despair that can take hold. In those moments, he said, “You don’t know if you can ever get back.” For us, that line captured the central theme of this film: What does it mean for soldiers who go to war to come back? What does it take? How are the soldiers who come home transformed by their experience of war? Who have they become? What have they lost and gained? Do soldiers who go to war ever really come back? The “if” is an important part of the title. The film invites viewers into this question. We hope to provoke engagement with ongoing public conversations about the post-9/11 wars, the inadequate resources available for veterans, and the place of the military in American society more broadly.

The project began as an assignment for a magazine. Why did you decide to pursue the project as a film, rather than still photographs or a piece of writing? What challenges and opportunities did filmmaking bring to the telling of the story?

The initial seeds of this film are more than a decade old. In 2007, Phil Sands and I (Emma) were on assignment for GQ Magazine in Iraq, embedded with the 101st Airborne Division in the Triangle of Death. We stayed in touch with some of the soldiers we met there, and through our many conversations over the following years we became increasingly intrigued by the question they were all struggling with: What does it mean to come home when you’re no longer the person you once were?

Taylor and I decided to pursue this story as a documentary because film lends itself particularly well to open-endedness, indeterminacy, and nuance. We wanted to offer an exploration, not a thesis. Documentary film is a fundamentally collaborative project, and we wanted to empower our subjects to share their stories in their own words. The intimacy of film also allows audiences to develop deeper emotional connections.

The veterans you feature in the film share their most vulnerable moments with you. What steps do you take to help them and their families feel comfortable in front of the camera? What is that process like?

This kind of film takes deep trust and mutual respect. Our shared history in Iraq was a starting point, but ultimately time was the only way to build real trust. We embedded ourselves deeply in their lives. We ate Thanksgiving dinner at Robert’s home, tagged along on Kristina’s family beach vacation, and celebrated Phil’s daughter’s birthday with all of his relatives. We developed meaningful relationships with each of them and built a strong rapport off camera, which helped ease any anxieties when cameras were rolling.

There were also certain moments when we chose to turn our cameras off, when it felt disrespectful or invasive to film. We are humans first, filmmakers second. Those decisions showed our subjects that we weren’t there to exploit them or use their stories for our own ends. We were clear from the beginning that we wanted to tell the truth, in all of its complexity, and our subjects shared that goal.

You have said that the film explores the challenges of reconciliation that these soldiers face. What is being reconciled, and how do you show that on film?

The three veterans at the center of our film are struggling to reconcile military life and the civilian world, past selves and present selves, and many contradictory feelings about their military service. Soldiers returning from combat face the profound challenge of reconciling the rules and moral norms of war with those of civilian life. Combat medics must also reconcile a fundamental contradiction at the heart of their role. They are trained to save, but also to kill, and their job on the battlefield is to aid not only American soldiers but also wounded enemy combatants and bystanders, many of whom are children.

Our subjects take the lead in exploring these challenges of reconciliation through their open, honest reflections. Careful juxtapositions — between our three subjects, between present-day footage and their homemade videos from Iraq, between moments of joy and despair, loneliness and love, and tranquility and turmoil — further underscore this theme.

Now that America’s “forever wars” have ended, where do you see your project fitting into the legacy of these actions?

Projects like If You Can Ever Get Back are more important than ever. The “forever wars” have ended, but their consequences are profound and ongoing, and it’s going to take a lot of persistent work to make sure that the people affected are not overlooked. So many veterans struggle with mental health challenges, moral injury, and extensive physical health problems. Political attention spans are short and honestly reckoning with the consequences of war is difficult. But it is during peacetime, when the exigencies of war have eased, that we can and must have those harder conversations.

There is a generation of adults that don’t remember 9/11, and soon there will be a generation that doesn’t remember the Iraq war. Films like ours contribute to collective memory. They also help bridge the profound divide between military families and those far removed from America’s wars.

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