Deborah Scranton hands digital video cameras to three soldiers from the New Hampshire National Guard's Charlie Company before their deployment to Iraq in 2004, then builds the film almost entirely from what they shoot themselves. Specialist Mike Moriarty, Sergeant Zack Bazzi, and Sergeant Steve Pink film convoy runs along the notoriously dangerous Route Irish, guard duty at Abu Ghraib, and the aftermath of roadside bombs, along with the boredom and dark jokes that fill the hours between. Bazzi, a Lebanese immigrant who enlisted partly for college money, argues with a translator about the war's purpose on camera. Pink turns his footage into blunt commentary on contractors profiting from the occupation. Interviews with the men's wives and mothers back home fill in what the war costs the families left behind. Scranton stays off screen and lets the soldiers narrate their own footage, so the film reads less like reporting on the war and more like a diary three men kept while they were still inside it.