Writing about experience necessarily sanitizes it, theorizes Sangjoon Han, a Korean-American soldier who fought in Iraq and is one of many articulate talking heads in Richard E. Robbins’s documentary “Operation Homecoming.” Built around the firsthand recollections of soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the film is a spinoff from an anthology of essays, e-mail messages, poems and letters compiled by the National Endowment for the Arts and published by Random House.

Mr. Han’s “Aftermath,” a fictional composite of several events, is one of the strongest and most sophisticated contributions. Written from the dual perspectives of a fleeing Iraqi farmer and an American soldier who shoots him after repeatedly shouting at him to stop, it reaches a tragically absurd conclusion in which the American treats the farmer “whose vital organs were piled on top of him” with an IV.

As you absorb the most graphic images of combat and how it changes people in these works written by soldiers but read by nine actors, “sanitize” is not a word that comes to mind. The best pieces portray combat as such a heightened sensory experience that it demands to be written about, and they suggest that war can turn ordinary men who wouldn’t think of keeping diaries into latter-day Hemingways.

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The visual images illustrating these recollections are pertinent wartime montages (one story is accompanied by animation), but they can’t compete with the power of the words. Listening is like reading variations of “Snowden’s Secret,” the climactic chapter of “Catch-22,” in which Yossarian, tending a dying man, realizes that “man is matter.” Several pieces describe the animal terror of death during combat in visceral language that involves every organ of the body.

Here is a sample, from e-mail that John McCary, an Army sergeant, sent to his friends and family after attending a funeral for soldiers from his unit in 2004: “What do you say to your men after you’ve scraped up the scalps of an entire Iraqi family off the road right next to the shattered bodies of your soldiers held together only by their shoelaces, body armor or helmets: we’re fighting the good fight? I don’t think so. We’re just fighting. And now we’re dying.”

In “Medevac Missions,” Ed Hrivnak, an Air Force veteran who served for 20 years, discusses the guilt of those who have been through combat and asserts that everyone who has engaged in a lot of ground combat knows he has killed innocent people. Several writers describe the impossible, split-second choice of whether to shoot. The most heartbreaking story is Jack Lewis’s “Road Work,” which describes an old Iraqi man who has just witnessed the shooting by American soldiers of his beloved son, who is later revealed to have been an engineer and the pride of his family. (The New York Times)