THE DEADBOLT: Are you getting different responses in different parts of the country?

PEIRCE: Absolutely, and yet a common thread among them. They're not different countries, they're different parts of "A" country, which I find fascinating. I take my movie from the culture. I interview soldiers, I interview my brother, I collect footage, and then I wanted to write a story that was an emblematic story. I didn't want to write a movie about a "few soldiers." I wanted to tell the story of this generation that signed up after 9/11 for all the right reasons - to protect their home, their family, and their country. They signed up with a buddy. They were from a small town. I knew that was kind of the classic story that was emerging. They got over there and realized that was is about surviving. War is about protecting the guy to your left and the guy to your right. And given the nature of this war, it's a huge challenge to be able to be effective as a soldier. Over and over, I heard that from the soldiers. They were like, "We want to be great soldiers. It's almost impossible in THIS war to be a great soldier."

THE DEADBOLT: Why?

PEIRCE: This is all coming from soldiers, not from me. There's not a green zone. In Vietnam, you were at your base and you wouldn't get attacked and, on the weekends, you go and get prostitutes and drink and party. That's not happening here. You're setting up bases very near to the cities that you're monitoring, which means that they can mortar attack you. Mortars are very imprecise weapons but if you send 500 mortars a day and you have people who are running around setting them up and shooting them out, when it hits, that guy is on a cell phone telling someone else, "That one hit. That was the right way to send it." Already, that means that the soldiers are living with constant sense of threat. They go to bed at night under threat.

The second thing is that they're not fighting in the deserts, they're fighting in the bedrooms and the hallways of the houses. That means that well-intentioned people and soldiers are being asked to do the nearly impossible. How do you go into a hostile situation, particularly in a house? That's called a funnel of death. How do you go in there and keep yourself and your men alive and distinguish between the purely innocent and the combative? What ends up happening then? You end up killing innocent people and you end up getting your guys killed or wounded. So, how do you feel about that? You feel devastated because you want to be a good soldier. Over and over again, that's the story I heard.

Then again, I go back to the idea of the emblematic way to tell a story. This is emblematic of this war. This is unusual to anything we've experienced. That's why when they come home, they don't want to go back. They're patriots and they're volunteers. They want to finish the job and then they want to get out. That's why Stop Loss is emblematic. 81,000 are stop-lossed.

THE DEADBOLT: It's incredible. Why do you think the stop loss situation has been so under-reported?

PEIRCE: In Vietnam, you had a draft. So, everybody was literally affected by the draft. Everybody's son can go, everybody's brother can go, everybody's father can go; that's the culture. The whole culture is involved. Right now, it's the people who volunteered. So, even though the military is huge and the military families are a huge number, it is a select group of the society. So, automatically, it's part of a smaller part of the culture. Secondarily, they are patriots. They signed up to fight. I believe that's a part of the culture that doesn't speak up about something that's unfair, certainly not in the public at large. It's definitely being talked about in the military community but how does the civilian community find out about it if the military community is not raising it to that level? So, that's why the website is so important to me. Again, this movie communicates the way this generation communicates. And what I love about the website is that I have soldiers and military families saying, "This is my story." I'm just trying to give people a chance to talk about it. When you write about it and you say, "We don't have people enlisting and this is how they're sustaining it." Then people will know.

And even the military admits it's not a good solution. Google "Gates". Gates is saying, "We're trying to reduce our reliance on stop loss but we don't have an alternative." I just think that we should start educating people on the term stop loss. From the soldier's point of view, they're calling it a back door draft. They're saying it's recycling people and they're shouldering an unfair burden. And THEY say it's violating their contract. And these are patriots.

Do you know what a soldier told me yesterday? We should reinstate the draft. He said if we reinstated the draft then everybody would be heard and then the conflict would represent what the people really want. And then if the people want us to be in Iraq, we'll be there. If the people don't want us, we won't. These are complicated issues and I'm very passionate about getting them right. In a sort of historical way, I want to get it right because I want people to choose once they hear.

Choose for yourself when Stop Loss opens in theaters on March 28th.