A Purple Heart, the honour given to soldiers for their wounds, is one that many cling to when faced with the realities of both the return home and their time at war. Nina Berman's portraits are accompanied by first-person interviews with the young soldiers, who discuss their lives, their reasons for enlisting, their experiences in Iraq and their prospects as disabled veterans: some of them blind, some without limbs, others brain damaged and wheelchair bound.

The words and the pictures make for a complex portrait of American youth, their values, their dreams, the lack of opportunity facing them upon leaving high school, and the myths of warfare which informed their decisions to join. One soldier explained that he always wanted to be a hero and thought the military would be fun; he never imagined an RPG attack in Fallujah would leave him a cripple unable to care for a wife and two children. Another described calling the recruiting station after seeing an MTV-style Army commercial on television: an immigrant from Pakistan, he was given his citizenship following his injury, a fair trade in his mind, a leg for an American passport. Yet another left a crime and drug ridden neighbourhood in Alabama, only to return one hundred per cent disabled to where he started, now bedridden.

The photographs are accompanied by essays from Verlyn Klinkenborg, an author and editorial writer, and Tim Origer, a veteran and former Marine who fought in the Tet offensive and came back a nineteen-year-old amputee.