Veterans put their own stories on film

Despite the Hurt Locker's critical success (including a Best Picture and Best Director win at Monday's Academy Awards ceremony), many veterans have taken issue with factual liberties taken in the film--they say Director Katheryn Bigelow chose spectacle over realism.

A new program sponsored by the Brave New Foundation, however, will allow five veterans to tell their own stories about the reality in Iraq and Afghanistan on film.

"What we are hoping to do is to get . . . a perspective we may not have seen, or that we see very infrequently, and that is the direct perspective of the veteran," said Richard Ray Perez, executive producer of “In Their Boots,” a Web series on the wars' effects in the U.S.

That perspective is readily available in print. One of the veterans, Clint Van Winkle, 32, of Phoenix has published an unflinching account, "Soft Spots: A Marine's Memoir of Combat and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder." But because a film is more difficult to produce, most war documentaries are the product of civilian filmmakers.

Although their subjects vary, the filmmakers share a desire to challenge the stereotypes about veterans.

"It's almost a cliche. I'm a vet with PTSD," said Van Winkle, who plans to take up the subject again in a film about a friend wrestling with survivor's guilt after escorting home the remains of a fellow Marine.

"But I'm not on the street. I went to school. I have two degrees. I'm a functioning person, but I have issues."

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