From one of its earliest scenes—when a soldier utters the line, “After the first murder,
everything that I believed in about the Army was gone”—it’s hard not to be gripped
by
Dan Krauss’s documentary
The Kill Team. The 79-minute film, which won Best Documentary at this spring’s Tribeca Film Festival,
recounts the story of US soldiers accused of murdering innocent civilians in Afghanistan
in 2009.
When the news broke, the media dubbed the soldiers the “Kill Team.” Director and cowriter
Krauss, whose previous work includes the Oscar-nominated short
The Death of Kevin Carter, turns the camera around, letting four of the accused tell their story. It’s not a
pretty picture.
Private First Class
Justin Stoner complains that serving in Afghanistan was “nothing like everyone hyped it to be.”
They’d been trained to “kick ass,” he says, but were sent to the desert to dig wells
and build schools. He and some of his fellow soldiers were itching to “get a kill.”
According to the soldiers, the platoon leader, Staff Sergeant
Clavin Gibbs, had the same bloodlust, and concocted schemes to kill innocent Afghans. In one,
the men would “drop” a grenade or gun by a victim’s body to make the killing look
like self-defense.
After the first murder, Specialist
Adam Winfield is dumbfounded by his unit’s actions. Krauss tells much of the tale through Winfield.
Whether he is innocent is a matter of the viewer’s interpretation, and some may find
Krauss’s clear sympathies for him biased. Still, it’s hard not to be moved by the
intimate, raw scenes of Winfield’s family as they fight the charges leveled against
Adam. Particularly compelling is the way in which the film includes Facebook messages
between father and son.
The Kill Team raises challenging questions. Does the warfighter culture glorify killing? Does war,
with its constant threat of being killed, so deaden a soldier’s humanity that he begins
to see everyone as a potential enemy? Does the military’s system of justice cover
up wrongdoing and fail whistleblowers who try to report crimes? (Those who charge
the military with ignoring sexual assaults would say yes.)
The most troubling question raised in the film is whether this was an isolated incident
or indicative of a widespread problem. “This goes on more than just us,” says Stoner,
referring to civilian killings. “We’re just the ones who got caught.”
You may dismiss that as the justification of a guilty conscience. Surely most soldiers
know right from wrong. Or is one issue that many Americans cling, perhaps naively,
to John Wayne notions of a soldier? Whether you come away thinking these soldiers
were atypical savages or the product of a flawed military, the film accomplishes its
mission of making viewer reassess what they may have thought about our armed forces.
“War is dirty. It’s not how they portray it in the movies where there’s a bunch of
honorable men with unshakeable patriotism,” Winfield says. “It’s just a bunch of guys
with guns.”
Playing June 20, 5:30 PM, at the National Portrait Gallery, and June 21, 6:30 PM,
at AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center.
Sherri Dalphonse joined Washingtonian in 1986 as an editorial intern, and worked her way to the top of the masthead when she was named editor-in-chief in 2022. She oversees the magazine’s editorial staff, and guides the magazine’s stories and direction. She lives in DC.
