This film’s story began when I was working as an embedded Australian journalist in Afghanistan in 2011 and met, documented and lived with the members of the helicopter medevac unit featured in the film. I have continued documenting their lives over the last six years, updating their stories as they returned home to locations all across America and periodically in the following years. All of the subjects of the film have been affected by what they (we) saw in Afghanistan.



For me, the purpose of the film was always to communicate the intensity of the medevac role and to breathe some human complexity back into our go-to concept of a veteran and the challenges that veterans face. The very different men and women from the medevac missions – from family types to fierce individuals, unwavering cynics, flippant jokers and staunch faithfuls – are now spread right across America from New York to Louisiana, Texas, Idaho, Washington, Alabama, and California. They’re pretty much everywhere. Whether still on military bases or in civilian life, they’ve all forged lives beyond who they were on that helicopter. And yet, in some ways, they are all still there.



My hope, with Trauma is to simply highlight a very small but real aspect of that war, and what it is like now for those individuals.



– Harry Sanna

