A shameless agitdoc, but one of the few that truly earns its agitation, The Ground Truth is about what it's like to be a soldier in the post-9/11 world. Uniformly haunted and mostly aggrieved, young veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan testify into the camera, addressing neither the government nor the nation, but individuals. Don't enlist, they implore (sometimes explicitly). The psychological trauma isn't worth the college education. The veterans are well chosen: Between the charismatic Sean Huze, the handsome suicide Jeff Lucey, and the amputee Robert Acosta, there are characters as vivid as (and more articulate than) any in the World War II melodrama The Best Years of Our Lives. The soundtrack shifts from the bloody, exposed nerve of Mos Def's phenomenal not-quite rap "Live Wire Snap" to the soothing, parent-friendly "Day After Tomorrow," by Tom Waits.

If The Ground Truth looks very different from another obvious precursor, Winter Soldier—the recently rereleased documentary about the hearings staged by Vietnam Veterans Against the War—it's because those politicized sons of privilege ultimately succeeded in dismantling the draft. The analogies come almost too easily now: Military recruiters deceive the American poor; the president deceives the American people.

But The Ground Truth is emphatically a grunt's-eye-view of the war—you get no sense of the geography of the combat zone, no foreign policy (save one man's sad observation that every soldier he met seemed to blame Iraq for 9/11), and no military strategy (assuming that such a thing exists in the prosecution of this war). It's essentially an anti-recruitment video, and a plea for more protective armor and better psychological services for returning veterans. On all counts, it's bitter and effective.