American soldiers have spent a century as unwitting test subjects for their own government, and Abby Martin's Empire Files episode lays out the paper trail. It opens with World War I, when more than sixty thousand Black troops were subjected to chemical experiments meant to gauge their combat effectiveness; the program stayed classified until 1993, by which point only about 600 of those men could still be found and treated. From there the film moves through lobotomies performed on traumatized veterans before PTSD was recognized as a diagnosis, the CIA's MKUltra mind-control program launched under Allen Dulles in the 1950s, and Gulf War troops exposed to sarin gas and other battlefield hazards whose long-term illnesses the Department of Veterans Affairs has been slow to acknowledge. Martin relies on declassified documents and government records to build each case, treating them as a pattern rather than isolated scandals. The film's argument is blunt: an institution that asks for sacrifice has repeatedly used that sacrifice as an experiment, then denied responsibility for the harm.