When he was still a high school student in New Jersey, Ryan sees the Twin Towers collapse on September 11, 2001 and joins the Marines. Back from Iraq in 2006 he is transformed: shocked, depressed, isolated, suicidal, leading a roving life—the impossible life of a man in his twenties, haunted by his scary war visions.

Between the beginning of 2009 and the end of the same year, he loses more than forty pounds. From Ryan’s Iraqi past, I just knew the things he said during the Winter Soldier, in May. At that time, his detox from alcohol was over but his morphology still bears some traces.

We often met, but I never asked a single question. He rarely talks about “that.” During the last days of 2009, shortly before the beginning of the filming, I still did not know for sure that Ryan would accept to appear on camera. In a Facebook chat, three days before the arrival of the film crew, he was clear: “Let’s do it.” We filmed. On this mountain, he would say everything, unpack his bag. He told me later that during the days of filming that he burned a large amount of his “Iraqi” pictures. “All but one. A reminder.”