{"id":13743,"date":"2016-08-23T15:34:10","date_gmt":"2016-08-23T22:34:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/?post_type=films&#038;p=13743"},"modified":"2025-05-20T11:11:38","modified_gmt":"2025-05-20T18:11:38","slug":"farmer-veteran","status":"publish","type":"films","link":"https:\/\/dipsy.pbs.org\/independentlens\/documentaries\/farmer-veteran\/","title":{"rendered":"Farmer\/Veteran"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Home from three combat tours in Iraq, Alex Sutton forges a new identity as a farmer, hatching chicks and raising goats on 43 acres in rural North Carolina. <\/span><b><i>Farmer\/Veteran<\/i><\/b> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">shows Alex diving into life on the farm with his new love Jessica, while the traumas of war linger on.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The stories he tells about battlefield experiences become unmoored from reality as he cycles between states of heightened awareness and \u201cfeeling zombified\u201d from a cocktail of prescriptions meant to keep him stable. For the viewer, as for Alex, what to believe about his past is uncertain as we learn more of his own complicated truths. The farm becomes a terrain to unearth what is buried, what it really means to be \u201cthe perfect soldier,\u201d and where to find the way forward. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Home from three combat tours in Iraq, Alex Sutton forges a new identity as a farmer, hatching chicks and raising goats on 43 acres in rural North Carolina. Farmer\/Veteran shows Alex diving into life on the farm with his new love Jessica, while the traumas of war linger on. The stories he tells about battlefield [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":13744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"topic":[1254,1258],"class_list":["post-13743","films","type-films","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","topic-disease-and-mental-health","topic-war-military"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Farmer\/Veteran | Veteran Fights PTSD on Farm | Independent Lens | PBS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Farmer\/Veteran is a portrait of a combat veteran\u2019s fragile struggle to overcome PTSD and transition to life as a farmer in North Carolina.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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