"Diary of a Disgraced Soldier": Can Art Save the Life of a Veteran Battling PTSD?

Editor's note: Video from Diary of a Disgraced Soldier at the bottom of this page:

Cpl. Martin Webster hadn't slept in more than two days.

The night before, he had killed an insurgent during a firefight. With the sun up, thousands of Iraqis were rioting in the streets and taking out their anger on Webster and the other 100 some British soldiers in his unit, the 1st Battalion, Light Infantry, which was charged with maintaining order in Al Amara, Iraq. They were mere days from the end of their deployment.

The heat was unbearable -- over 90 degrees from dawn to dusk. Each soldier got a bottle or two of water a day and had just about 150 rounds of ammunition each. Their rules of engagement were drafted nearly 10 years early, in 1995, and were intended for Northern Ireland.

But the soldiers had their mission, Operation Telic 3. On this day in March 2004, it meant holding a government palace in the city. They had been under siege for several days by Iraqis frustrated with deteriorating conditions. Some Iraqis threw stones at the troops. Others fired rocket propelled grenades (RPGs). Several youth even threw grenades.

Webster was sent to overlook the rioting from a rooftop. He took out his personal video camera, which he bought on a military base, and started filming. The camera rolled as a group of his fellow military men chased after some young Iraqis and returned with four of them as prisoners. The Iraqi youth were then beaten with batons, punched and kicked. A soldier walked up to one of the prisoners and kicked him between the legs.

During the filming, Webster laughed menacingly and taunted the "naughty little boys." It could have been just another day of the occupation of Iraq but two years later, in 2006, the video was leaked to the British tabloid press and was broadcast around the world.

Webster was arrested by military police but all charges against him were dropped; he left the Army shortly after the media storm. A new documentary, titled Diary of a Disgraced Soldier, follows Webster after his military separation and subsequent struggle with Post Taumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

In the film, Webster talks about how that two-minute video clip "destroyed" his life, but he doesn't regret filming his tour in Iraq.

"I thought at times it was ruining my life," Webster, 34, told AlterNet. "But actually it was making me wake up and realize who I was, what I was and basically made me realize the horrors of war and what people turn into in war, including myself."

The veteran said the video did have one positive aspect: it woke people up to the reality of war.

"I'm a soldier and I was designed to kill," said Webster, who also served two tours in Northern Ireland and another in Sierra Leone. "The British government spent 12 years turning me into an angry killer and when I acted like an angry killer and when it was portrayed on TV, nobody liked it or could handle it. That's what a soldier is designed to do."

According to Webster, the mainstream media today hide the reality of war on another front.

"I believe that with the media blackout that we've got now in Afghanistan, it means the general public can't see what's actually going on. Anything that does get out is scripted and vetted," he explained.

Webster wanted to share his side of what happened in Iraq. In 2007, he approached filmmakers Richard Atkinson, Neil Cole and Chris Rowe to make Diary of a Disgraced Soldier. The documentary started off seeking to explain and explore the beating incident and subsequent scandal, Atkinson said, but the story "evolved" into focusing on how Webster coped with his PTSD.

"There seems to be an awful lot of opinion from media commentators but not so much from the soldiers themselves who are, after all, the ones in the firing line," Atkinson told AlterNet. "Our aim was to give a voice to a soldier who had been to war and had been dramatically affected by his experiences out there."