“I’m not advocating pro-war or anti-war or anything–I’m not even commenting on the war. I’m commenting on the experience,” Morris said. “It’s hard to let other people understand what goes on when a kid gets scared and shoots up a car full of a family. I think the best thing that we can do is show people and talk about it and bring it up.”

Corporal Brett Gelesko, a member of Morris’s company in Afghanistan, is featured in the film. He believes there is wide misunderstanding of a Marine’s role in the war.

“When people hear Marines they have a certain perception about, you know, maybe how bad ass they are or what they do as a service. People have those ideas of what we do out there,” Gelesko said. “In any infantry service there’s very raw ups and downs of being in that kind of situation.”

Morris used small pocket cameras strapped to vehicles, helmets, backpacks, guns–anything he could think of. The resulting footage is visceral. It’s everything reality TV wants to be. There’s a sincerity present that can’t be mimicked. It’s there in a soldier’s heavy breathing as his team storms a contested village. It’s there in the off-the-cuff humor of the boys in downtime. Through Morris, the viewer is not a witness, but a participant.

“I know some of the Marines were pretty annoyed … he was pretty persistent with questions and pictures,” Gelesko said.

For Morris, the film is more like a home movie than a documentary.

For a journalist focusing entirely on the project, to capture the footage in the film would be a logistical accomplishment. For Morris to do so, while also tasked with the life and death duties of being a soldier in a war zone, it is a remarkable achievement.

“We have giant eight-wheeled, almost like tank, vehicles. My job was to do a lot of the maintenance of those. I strapped camera to the inside and outside of stuff but I was splitting my energy between getting those cameras set up and functioning the way that they were supposed to and maintaining the vehicle,” Morris said. “It was a nightmare.”

The work has impressed SF State cinema department production coordinator Scott Boswell, who has helped Morris with some of his editing.

“[Logistically] it’s huge. It’s huge. Very few students are able to accomplish making a film, much less a full feature-length documentary,” Boswell said. “Very few people have the focus and the drive. That’s where Owen is different.”