Today was a first for me.  I saw my own DVD collection on the shelf at Barnes & Noble .





It is a bargain box set, all five of my Iraq War documentaries on one disc .

Also available at Target and of course, Amazon .

In 2005 when I quit my job in the Kansas Attorney General's office, bought a TV camera and ran off to Fallujah, Iraq with my old Marine Corps unit, I never thought it would turn out like this.

I knew there was more to the story than was being told in the Mainstream Media.  If I didn't tell that story, I doubted anyone else would.  I also spotted a gap in the market.  Local TV affiliates didn't have coverage of local service members fighting the war.  My first trip to Iraq was as a one-man TV news syndicator and blogger.

At the time I thought it was probably a one shot deal.  I produced my first documentary, Outside The Wire:  Call Sign Vengeance, from those months with the Marines operating around Fallujah.

Then in 2007 I got an offer to go shoot video for CBS Productions for TV shows it was producing.  When their exclusivity window on the video license expired, I released a trilogy of documentaries.  Danger Close, about Al Qaida's attempt to overrun a small outpost of paratroopers; Anbar Awakens, the story of how the tribes of Anbar joined the Marines to rout Al Qaida; and Baghdad Surge which follows an Army infantry company commander through a non-stop day on the streets.

In 2008 I released Baghdad Happens, the story of a wild, crazy and successful daytime raid to capture a Jaish al Mahdi cell leader.

With the success of the Surge and interest in Iraq waning, I shifted focus to Afghanistan.  My focus also shifted from making movies to doing in-depth studies and observation work for the McCormick Foundation and the Cantigny Museum, reporting for TIME and National Review and lower profile work for other clients.

The Iraq War was winding down and the movies seemed to have run their course until I got an email from a company that stocks DVD collections in big box stores.  The retailers were looking for straight down the middle documentaries.  I was the only person with five, straight, a-political enough Iraq documentaries available for licensing.  Early on my business partner and co-producer David Chavarria and I decided that the movies would be pro-soldier, but show the war exactly as I saw it through a camera lens.  We didn't know it at the time, but this would be what retailers and documentary DVD buyers would be looking for at the end of the war.

Andrew Breitbart frequently says, be the media.  I set out to be the media, but would not have amounted to much without all the bloggers who linked to me and everyone who who bought DVDs over the years.  Thank you to everyone who over the years bought a DVD, hit the tip jar or posted a link.

With the end of the US presence in Iraq, I hope these documentaries show viewers what it was like to be a Marine in Anbar province in 2005, a Soldier in Baghdad during the Surge, a paratrooper just rocked by a thousand pound suicide truck bomb.

I also anticipate they will stand the test of time.  The understanding of the Iraq War's place in History is years, if not decades away, but these documentaries capture the reality of what it was like for Soldiers and Marines on the ground as it happened, preserving their stories forever.

What comes next?  I've teamed up with a Russian production company to produce a documentary on Afghanistan with the most unique point of view, I have a library of footage and probably 300 pages worth of stories to tell.

In a few days I will be taking off for Afghanistan again, my ninth trip to the wars.  A tenth trip is already scheduled on the calendar.  As a production team we now operate under a simple motto:  History.  Capture the History while it is happening.

That is what I will do for as long as I can.

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