In terms of war photography, the guts have always been there. People like Don McCullin and George Strock risked not just life and limb, but withstood the debilitating mental horror of battle, to capture in exquisite photographs the banal madness of 20^th century conflict on film. But our 21^st century conflicts – Afghanistan, Iraq – are producing some of the most compelling, wrenching, and harrowing war documentaries ever made. People like Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger (Restrepo), Ian Olds and Garrett Scott (Occupation: Dreamland), and now Dafung Dennis with Hell and Back Again, have made war films that are strikingly intimate, unfiltered, up-close, and as close to an experience of battle as you could have outside of strapping on a camouflage helmet. These filmmakers have guts, but they also have access and technology, handheld cameras that can produce remarkable photographs and can be carried into the thick of a firefight.

But there is another quality to these films that seems particular to our current age of story telling: all these films share a deep affection for the individual soldier and a determined focus on the personhood of man at war above and beyond any and all other concerns, whether they political, existential, or propagandistic. This is not to say the war photographers of the past didn’t share this connection to the common man lost in war – they did. But the rally call of the post-9-11 conflicts has always been that we support the troops, even if we have grown dubious of the reasons for their deployment. You could almost call it the age of self, the narcissistic tendencies of reality media – our American Idol appetite – manifesting itself in its most humane form.

War and Back Again is a film about one soldier, which makes it a film about all soldiers. That part-for-the-whole is established in the film’s tight-lipped, un-flapping opening sequence, in which, in the midst of the dizzying disorientation of a fire fight, a marine goes down. His buddies, nameless soldiers in camouflage costume, huddle around the human shape on the ground. You can tell from the way the camera stares, transfixed by the scene, that Dennis is going to do what even fictional accounts from war shy away from, or at least try to distract from with manic theatrics: he is going to watch this young man quietly die. A few seconds later the screen fades to black, and when it fades back in, a handful of dazed marines watch their comrades carry a black body bag across the screen.

If battle is not about death, then it isn’t about anything. War is a mechanism of political pressure, an effort to leverage notions of justice, to preserve stability, to extend national influence, and to protect the political and economic structures that allow for life. But war’s tool, battle, is only about death. It is about being aware of death’s imminent reality, and the test of battle is not the ability to accomplish set objectives or even to manage to survive; it is about being able to come to grips with death’s mysterious, monolithic presence of life’s horizon.

This point is driven home throughout War and Back Again, as we watch the film’s protagonist, Sergeant Nathan Harris, in the war zone and back home. During the last days of his third tour of duty, Harris was shot in the hip, a crippling injury that transforms his homecoming into long and difficult rehabilitation.

The power of Dennis’ film is that it makes no delineation between the arena of war and Harris’ struggles back home. The film cuts between Afghanistan and North Carolina seamlessly, often allowing the buzz and blur of war to infuse into the soundtrack of Harris’ post-Afghanistan day-to-day. A home buying tour turns into a house-clearing mission; a trip through a drive-through fast food restaurant blurs into the hectic and confusing shouting that unfurls as Harris’ platoon comes under fire on the front.

Dennis’ war scenes offer a panorama of battle frustrations, from impossible negotiations with the local people to the simmering and boiling-over of soldierly frustration to a final, intense battle scene in which the camera itself is nearly blown to smithereens by a road-side bomb. Home proves no less harrowing as Harris struggles not only with a realization that his crippled body will inhibit him from ever returning to the front – “To kill people,” has he plainly states his desire for joining the Marines – but also with the onset of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Unexplained irritability and suicidal thoughts strain his relationship with his young wife, Ashley.

Dennis’ documentary style is a hybrid of the detached, steady eye of cinéma vérité and an astute and active narrator attune to the way cinematic semantics create meanings that pictures by themselves can not. Montage can manipulate our perceptions of reality, but in Hell and Back Again, it accentuates it, deepening and layering our experience of the movie’s character with an almost novelistic psychological subtly. With his documentary, Dennis tries to make the war film that hasn’t yet been made: the film that is lost, like our soldiers, somewhere in between war and peace.