A scene from Combat Obscura (Oscilloscope Laboratories)

Miles Lagoze served in Afghanistan as his unit’s official videographer from 2011 through 2012. His job was to shoot and edit footage for the United States Marines to use for recruitment and “historical initiatives.” According to the opening on-screen narration, he also shot much more. Combat Obscura cobbles together all the footage the Marines did not intend you to see. It is not an easy watch, nor is it meant to be. Nevertheless, the film offers a rewarding, deeply involving experience, though viewers should be prepared.

There is remarkable variety in what Lagoze has captured, enough that we feel we are getting a rich picture of these soldiers’ lives, even with the film’s relatively short length. Soldiers lounge around on off-duty, many times partying and getting stoned. Other sequences present an array of dealings with the local Afghans. Especially at the end, there are accounts of combat, and viewers see a few wounded soldiers and dead bodies.

Though the film can be difficult to follow—some of the dialogue is understandably muddled, and often viewers lack the context to fully know what is happening—almost every scene contains at least one detail that sets the mind on fire. For instance, in one brief moment, soldiers use a machine to test the fingerprints of a disembodied hand. Another features a soldier, who has put the safety on his machine gun, shining the gun’s laser pointer onto the bodies of local Afghan children for their amusement. Later, he and the other soldiers let the kids have cigarettes.

At one point, the soldiers raid a mosque, misinterpreting religious observance as a Taliban meeting. As they line up potential suspects against the wall, the question of whether or not anyone will be killed hovers in the air. In this situation, as in many others, everything feels incredibly precarious. Eventually, the soldiers determine the circumstances to be safe. Instead of music or any added effects, we hear birds chirping incessantly. Though human lives hang in the balance, the natural world continues as if nothing happened. This juxtaposition, surely an accident yet incredibly effective, is one of many such moments that the documentary has to offer.

A soldier, whose head is bandaged from a shrapnel wound, recounts watching a video of the most recent fight, and he feels none of it seems real; it was just like watching a movie. Combat Obscura puts this impulse to the test for its viewers, considering we are so much more desensitized to the moving image of contemporary war than, say, footage from the Vietnam War. Can we watch Combat Obscura and fully comprehend its reality?