By the spring of 2007, the United States had been at war in Iraq for four years. The public had been told the invasion would be quick, but by that point more than 3,500 American troops and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians had been killed, and the occupation had devolved into a grinding counterinsurgency defined by house raids, checkpoints, indefinite detention, and torture. Back home, most Americans went about their normal daily lives — shopping, commuting, watching TV — safely shielded from the visceral reality of what was happening in their name on the other side of the world.
A group of Iraq War veterans decided to change that.
