The Iraq war's toll on the people who fought it, assembled by director David O. Russell, who returns to the subject of his earlier film Three Kings by interviewing Iraqis who worked as extras on that production alongside American soldiers who served in the actual war. The film moves between soldiers describing combat and the difficulty of coming home, journalists who covered the invasion and occupation, politicians on both sides of the war debate, and a two-star general who led Marines to victory in the first Gulf War and now weighs that campaign against this one. Psychologists appear to address the mental strain visible in returning veterans, and family members describe what it means to wait for someone who may come back changed or not come back at all. Russell keeps the arrangement loose, letting contradictory accounts sit next to each other rather than resolving them, so the film reads as a set of testimonies about what the war cost rather than an argument about whether it was justified.