Changing Us, Iraq from a grunts point of view

Iraq vet’s movie helps him cope

By Robert Weller - The Associated Press
Posted : Thursday Jul 3, 2008 20:25:50 EDT

DENVER — Counseling and medication weren’t enough to help Laef Fox recover from his grim war experience in Iraq, and drugs and alcohol didn’t work either, so he tried making a movie instead.

The result is “Changing Us,” a film about the invasion from a grunt’s point of view. It will be screened in a private Fourth of July preview in Denver.

The 80-minute documentary, made with footage Fox shot while in Iraq, tells what it was like for an average squad assigned to protect the main supply route into Baghdad from frequent attacks launched from bunkers and a network of tunnels. That made his squad the frequent target of attacks.

Fox was in Iraq for six months starting in April 2003, just after the invasion began.

“I had a lot of unexpected explosions go off near me and random gunshots,” he said. When he came home the Veterans Administration diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder and he was given a partial disability.

It “took me three years to get over it,” he said, but he was still antsy during an interview with The Associated Press. He said the slightest noise can shake him and bring back bad memories, and he still has problems with his central nervous system.

“Alcoholism and anger almost overcame me completely,” he said, but a supportive family and girlfriend pushed him to get treatment.

“The treatment helped me climb from the hole I was in,” he said.

Putting the movie together helped him come to grips with what he had seen and done, and filled an urgent need he felt to tell his story.

“I just want to give people knowledge of one unit and the Iraqi experience,” he said.

His mother, Cyndi Fox of Lancaster, Ohio, said that when her son came home, he was so angry and depressed that “for a while I didn’t know him. He had always been the class clown.”
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