American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan wrote down what they saw, and this film builds itself entirely out of those words. The writing began with workshops the National Endowment for the Arts set up on military bases, and the strongest submissions were later published as a book edited by Andy Carroll, with excerpts appearing in The New Yorker in the summer of 2006. The film draws eleven pieces from that collection and stages them through several different visual approaches: poet Brian Turner reading his own lines directly to camera, archival combat footage, an animated sequence styled like a graphic novel, and a still-photograph montage shot by Antonin Kratochvil. Veteran authors sit alongside the original writers in interviews, discussing what got left out of official accounts, fear, doubt, boredom, and moments that don't fit a clean narrative of service. The film aired on PBS as part of the America at a Crossroads series in April 2007, in a shorter cut than its theatrical version. It stays close to the page throughout, treating the soldiers' own sentences as the primary evidence of what the wars were like.