One year anniversary of the release of the documentary short film “The Atomic Soldiers”
“The Atomic Soldiers” lets the veterans who witnessed the Hood test in Nevada tell their own stories. But the painful memories sometimes choke their recollections, leaving long and moving silences in place of words. “You don’t send 14,000 troops through ground zero and not call it anything but genocide,” says one.
The Atomic Soldiers, Morgan Knibbe’s profoundly moving 22-minute documentary, opens with silence. The camera focuses on a series of veterans of US atomic testing, and each of them looks back, some directly at the camera, some unable to. Their pain is palpable. When they begin to speak, the emotion in their voices swells.
Although each man was exposed to the radiation blasted from the US atomic tests more than 60 years ago, it’s clear that the experience sears through each of them like it was yesterday. You can watch the film here