Fighting for Life

Does award-winning documentarian Terry Sanders’s portrait of the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Maryland, have an agenda? You bet: to convince you that your tax dollars are well spent training doctors for combat medicine. Sanders had phenomenal access: The executive producer heads the Friends of the Uniformed Services University. The film alternates between students shuttling from classes to field-crisis simulations—including a “mass-casualty event,” complete with screaming volunteers in full wound makeup—and USU graduates patching up bodies in Iraq and shepherding survivors through rehabilitation. The result isn’t pro-war, just pro cleaning up the mess, one amputee at a time.