(Editor's note: I was a day late in getting this post up, but rest assured you'll have another post today so I won't be off schedule any more.)

And this is the point where I question the sanity of this endeavor.

Documentaries often deal with serious subject matter, so at some point watching one a day has to take its toll on my psyche, right?

Saturday was that day for me.

What I'm about to say may seem overly obvious, but war is never fun. Unless, that is, it's on an XBox. But even still, I can never fully enjoy myself while playing "Call of Duty." There's a thin veil that hangs over the game, and despite its best attempts to make a brutal reality "fun," with smooth gameplay mechanics and otherworldly accurate graphics, I can never play for long before I'm confronted with this truth: War is the ugliest thing we've created as a species.

Everyone knows this. Or they should. The realities of war should never be lost on modern Americans. Still, knowing something intellectually and knowing something from experience — even a voyeuristic experience — are two totally different beasts.

After watching "Restrepo," a film directed by American journalist Sebastian Junger and British/American photojournalist Tim Hetherington, I, and I say this in a way that's not meant to belittle the experience soldiers have in war zones, was rocked emotionally. I was wrecked in a way that I, naive and ignorant though I may be, wasn't expecting.

Sometime around 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, immediately after watching "Restrepo," I Facebook messaged two friends who are serving in the U.S. military. I wrote to them telling them I was thinking of them and that I hoped they were safe.

I wanted to wake my son up in the comfort and safety of his room and give him a hug. I wanted to be near people, and I was home alone (aside from the already mentioned sleeping boy). Maybe I wanted to experience the other side of humanity, the one at the opposite end of the spectrum from war, the one drawn toward love and connection.

That's because "Restrepo" painted one of the most brutally stark and violent and unfiltered depictions of war I've ever seen.

Yes, the film, which explores the year that Junger and Hetherington spent in Afghanistan on assignment for Vanity Fair, embedded with the U.S. Army in the Korengal Valley, features the "most dangerous place on Earth." And I know not all U.S. service men and women share these same experiences.

But, and maybe it's just me, the common stateside view seems to be that our military men and women are predominantly performing peacekeeping missions. Maybe it's something we tell ourselves to help us cope with the fact that our loved ones are in harm's way.

The soldiers on the other hand, at least those in "Restrepo," know fully what they face and help keep us back home "in the dark."

There's one heartbreaking scene where a soldier recounts having to wish his mom happy birthday mere days after losing one of his best friends in the platoon, the man who bears the name of the documentary (more on him later).

The soldier tells the camera how he didn't tell his mom about the combat he was engaged in, let alone that one of his best friends was just killed. He says he held it together for his mom, but, as they say, the camera never lies.

His heartache, while perhaps easily hidden from his mom through the phone, is shown in clear detail on camera. His pain is etched into his eyes. The way they dart, always moving, never settling in one place for long until his face regains its composure, tells us all we need to know about the pain he holds within.

And that's one of the easier scenes to digest. There's another brutal scene that occurs during a fight that lasts days and which the soldiers later describe as the stuff of nightmares. One soldier, in fact, recounts later how "four or five different sleeping pills" have yet to successfully allow him to have a full night's sleep without those haunting images popping into his head when he's sleeping.

During this scene, the camera never stops rolling, filming every detail of this hectic firefight with the Taliban. Shaky cam is given a new definition as we see confused soldiers scramble up a hillside, hiding behind trees and along the way trying to locate the enemy, who's attacking them seemingly from all sides.

One soldier narrates his survival of an RPG (rocket propelled grenade) from 10-feet away after already going down from a gunshot wound.

We see another soldier break down on screen as he's told his friend, a guy described as the best and toughest and smartest soldier the platoon has, has been killed. The camera shifts downward and we see a boot sticking out of a U.S. Army issued blanket covering a body.

We see this grief-stricken soldier and his hands cover his mouth, which is agape. We see eyes pool with tears. We see his body retch. We see his fellow soldiers try to encourage him to pull his emotions together. We hear gunshots. We see the soldier drop to his butt on the ground, distraught, unable to do anything but cry out in anguish. We hear his stifled screams. We want him to yell and grieve but we fear for his safety.

I imagine it's scenes like this that got "Restrepo" its 96 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The documentary was hailed almost unanimously by critics everywhere, except for one reviewer with the Orlando Sentinel who laments the documentary's "grunts-eye-view" of the war.

But for me, it's this "grunts-eye-view," in all its gory detail, that provides the film with its lasting impact. And no, it's not all blood and guts and heartache.

Most war documentaries take a broader scope to the conflict being covered. But by aiming its lens on one group of soldiers fighting in one of the most hellish war zones on Earth, "Restrepo" shines a different light on humanity.

Yes, it shows the worst parts (like war in general and how, often, innocent civilians are caught up in these engagements, and, even more specifically, one scene where soldiers whoop and cheer after watching an enemy literally get blown to pieces).

But "Restrepo" also shines a big, giant, bright, shining spotlight on humanity in an unexpected way.

The opening scene, for one, depicts PFC Juan Sebastián Restrepo, a Colombian-born naturalized U.S. citizen platoon medic, on board a plane, presumably heading toward Afghanistan. He's seated with three other soldiers and he's filming them goofing off. Restrepo mugs for the camera and tells his friends, in mock machismo, that they'll never "tame the beast" within him.

Later, we see a soldier playing an acoustic guitar, which used to be Restrepo's, and remembering how his friend would grow his fingernails long to play Flamenco songs and how the other soldiers would tease him for putting nail varnish on his nails to make them stronger.

We see scenes of soldiers hanging out in their bunker in their underwear, goofing off, calling each other names, wrestling, smoking cigarettes, playing handheld video games. Whatever it is that soldiers do during their down time to keep their mind off of war, we see.

It's slice of life stuff, but it's not boring. It's provides a face, a personality, to these brave men, and it helps the viewer care more about the heartbreaking parts because, at least for me, we can see our own friends and family in these people, which makes the difficult parts even harder to withstand.

Through "Restrepo," we experience the soldiers' struggles to heal, to mourn, to understand. Our experience, as a viewer, is, obviously, an experience that's quite different and distanced from what the soldiers encountered, but the fact that we can, safe from the comfort of our home, know a little more clearly what our friends and family are going through in a time of war, bridges that gap a little more.

And closing that distance is, I believe, the most important part of "Restrepo." For if we can better understand what our soldiers went through, maybe we, as their friends and family, can better serve them by helping them recover and heal and process what they went though.

It's maybe a long shot, but it's the least we can do.

--

Shortly after sending the Facebook message to my friend who's, from what I can gather, in Germany, but was, at some point, on the front lines as a U.S. Army infantryman, I got a reply. Here's what he wrote:

"It's kinda funny you watched that. The wife and I just watched it again a few days ago. It's pretty realistic man hahah. That's probably the best war documentary I've seen.

...I appreciate you sending me this message, it makes me feel pretty good knowing that people are getting a better understanding and appreciation of what guys like us do for a living, and what we have to go through. Thanks again man."

Watched:

Day 1: "The Union: The Business Behind Getting You High"

Day 2: "Pearl Jam 20"

Day 3: "My Winnipeg"

Day 4: "180 Degrees South"

Day 5: "Restrepo"

Still to come:

"Heavy Metal in Baghdad"

"Hoop Dreams"

"Man on Wire"

"Sweetgrass"

"Touching the Void"

"The Cove"

"Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child"

"Exit Through the Gift Shop"

"Encounters at the End of the World"

"The Garden"

"Wild China"

"Blindsight"

"Up the Yangtze"

"Beer Wars"

"Microcosms"

"Marwencol"

"No Impact Man"

"The Pixar Story"

"Capitalism: A Love Story"

"Waiting for Superman"

"Waste Land"

"The Business of Being Born"

"Who Killed The Electric Car"

"The Future of Food"

"Gonzo"

"Biggie and Tupac"

"We Live in Public"

"Examined Life"

"God Grew Tired of Us"

"The Thin Blue Line"

"Troubled Water"

"Dark Days"

"Paris is Burning"

"Page One"

"Which Way Home"