Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry of the Oregon Army National Guard deploys to Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the film follows its soldiers through combat and back home again. Interviews with the men themselves carry most of the film, cut against footage they shot on the ground, so the fighting is seen through the same eyes that lived it rather than through a narrator's distance. The second half tracks what deployment does after the uniform comes off: strained marriages, sleeplessness, the flat unreality of grocery stores and traffic after a year of patrols. The film does not stay narrowly personal either, working in enough of the war's political and strategic background to explain what these particular soldiers were sent to do and why. There is no reenactment and no outside expert layer, just the unit's own record of itself, which is the film's whole method: let a single National Guard company stand in for what deployment and return actually cost.