Venice film recounts trauma of US troops

A documentary premiering at the Venice film festival explores the trauma of US soldiers returning from war in Iraq and struggling to readjust to normal life, with little if any help from the military.

Ward 54, by Italian journalist Monica Maggioni, is named after the psychiatric wing of Walter Reed Hospital that treats army veterans in Washington DC.

Through the vivid recount of soldier Kristofer Goldsmith's experience, and that of the family of a marine who killed himself upon his return from Iraq, it sheds light on an increasingly alarming phenomenon that is still a taboo subject.

Since 2001, the number of suicides among the US military has risen exponentially, and in 2009 it surpassed the number of war casualties, according to specialist weekly Army Times. An average of 18 veterans commit suicide every day.

"Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is something that, at least while I was in, no one ever wanted to admit that they had," said Goldsmith, who burst into tears as the documentary was warmly applauded in Venice.

"The military is a culture of toughness... To be viewed as broken in any way, whether it be physically or mentally, is something that seems dishonourble."

Sent to Iraq in 2005 when he as 20, Goldsmith's task was to photograph and classify Iraqi corpses. After being ordered to take close-up pictures of bodies in a Baghdad mass grave, something snapped inside him and he began having nightmares and flashbacks.

Back in his home country, he reached out for help but no one seemed to understand his growing desperation. Diagnosed with severe depression, he asked to be discharged from the military, but was instead ordered to return to Iraq.

"If you are wounded in combat physically, you lose a leg, if you lose a hand, you take shrapnel, America seems to view you as a hero, whereas if you come back with invisible wounds, with emotional or mental scars, it's something that American culture doesn't seem to have the same reaction to," he said.