Soldiers Pay

Although John Kerry has thrown around the number 200 Billion dollars when discussing the price of the Iraq war during the presidential debates, the real cost - as with all war- comes from the impossible to measure human cost. The refusal to allow footage of deceased soldiers returning home from the war, and the fight from the media right to stop Nightline from listing the individual Americans who had died fighting the war, showed that there was a concentrated effort on behalf of some to keep the evidence of the human price of war away from the public. In a year loaded with advocacy documentaries from the left, David O. Russel's brilliantly titled Soldiers Pay may be the most necessary. The thirty-minute film had a tumultuous history which is fairly well detailed here. I had the opportunity to see the film today and found it to be a sobering reminder of what war costs. The film consists primarily of interview footage. Much of it with a soldier who details a robbery he was a part of, a situation which draws obvious parallels to Russel's Three Kings. His loss of innocence after being lied to by his superiors is gut-wrenching, but not nearly as frightening as listening to a soldier suffering from kidney stones because of dehydration discussing how his water was rationed while private contractors had access to anything they wanted. There are better films about how the Iraq invasion happened, there are better films about the war on terrorism, but Soldiers Pay may be the best film to remind everyone what war really costs.

The film will air on IFC Monday November 1.