If you haven’t seen Sean Smith’s film from Baghdad then do yourself a favour and check it out. Smith is a Guardian photographer who’s been shooting video whilst on an embed with a US outfit.

I don’t urge you to watch it with a view to persuading you of the sense or otherwise of the US military presence in Iraq, but for style reasons. The combination of interviews, action and stills photographs is simple and effective.

Either he or the Guardian doesn’t like his voice, since someone else links his piece.

The film shows moments in a fortnight with a group of exhausted soldiers. They watch an APV burn with their colleagues on board. They shoot dead a driver who fails to stop. A terrified old lady watches them go through her home one day, and dump a dead body on her doorstep the next.

Personally, I think American troops have to stay in Iraq. They broke it, they should fix it. There, I said it – and it’s easy to say.

But would you or your loved ones sign up for a fifteen month tour with Apache company? Likely not. And would you like to be on the receiving end when they’re tired, nervous and angry and don’t speak the language? Me neither.

And would you risk your life to record all that, knowing it will provide questions but no answers?

Postscript: the power of coincidence – an hour or so before I posted this, Lloyd Shepherd posted this