| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Movie Reviews

Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq. Dir. John Alpert and Ellen Goosenberg Kent. Prod. by HBO Documentary Films in association with Attaboy Films, 2007. 57 mins. (HBO Documentary Films, http://www.hbo.com/aliveday/)

Early in 2007, the actor James Gandolfini of The Sopranos fame brought ten severely wounded Iraq War veterans to an empty sound stage. He sat them down one at a time in front of the cameras and asked them to recall their "alive days"—that is, the days they were wounded in Iraq. He and the HBO documentary team then interspersed their testimonies with combat videos made by Iraqi insurgents and embedded American journalists; and footage of the soldiers themselves, before and after their wounding, at home and among their friends. The result is a deeply affecting—and highly constrained—portrait of the casualties of war.

The stories the veterans tell are horrific. Their tales typically begin with an account of their wounding, supplemented with footage of a similar attack. They recall their injuries in great detail, summoning up the reactions of their comrades and their own surprise at finding their limbs twisted and their flesh cut away. As they describe days in induced comas and multiple operations, they invite Gandolfini and the audience to linger over their scars and their prostheses.

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