New York (CNN) -- There are dozens of get-well cards on his wall. On his bed, there's another pile from family, friends, high school pals. The patient must be 19 or 20 -- a kid -- and his smile is magnetic.



His mother hugs every visitor, strangers like us included. "I'm a hugger," she explains. His girlfriend is by his bedside too, wearing a sweatshirt from her college in upstate New York, her studies interrupted.



"My leg will never be a hundred percent," he says, "which means I just have to get a new hundred percent."



It helps that we were visiting this wounded soldier at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, a few weeks ago, with the actor Woody Harrelson, instantly recognizable from TV and movies. Woody is profoundly good-natured and can make anyone smile, even the maimed young men and women, just back from a combat zone they carried home with them. But this particular soldier/kid is happy anyway. Happy to be alive, mature enough to be grateful.



A few weeks earlier, an Afghan soldier he had known for eight months -- a man who fought by his side -- turned his rifle on his American "allies" and killed two of this soldier's buddies, wounding three, including him. This kid knows he's among the lucky ones.



"I have no idea why he did it," he says.



"It's the Middle East," I reply.



"I guess so," he says with a sigh.



In room after room, our delegation encounters stories of war that are just not a part of the national conversation. I keep thinking: Whatever happened to the telling of these stories in America? Do we need a Washington lobbyist to push the soldier's-story agenda?



Individual tales make up the reality of war; anecdote by anecdote, they become the truth of combat. But in the U.S. mainstream media, they have too little presence. How did we get to a place where sharing a soldier's narrative or reading soldiers' names on television or meeting their coffins when they are brought back to their country becomes a political or disloyal act? Why can't we share the truth about war?



When I was growing up in Israel, we saw scenes from military funerals on the news: screaming, crying mothers and all. Wounded soldiers would be interviewed, sometimes with burned bodies or missing limbs. It was not political; it was just the subjective, human reality of the soldier. There was a need to know. It gave our warriors a public stage from which to reconnect.



I remember coming back from Lebanon when I was a soldier in the '80s, feeling like I've just been to another planet. Filmmaking, storytelling, was my therapy.



We made an earlier trip to Walter Reed, along with our lead Ben Foster, to immerse ourselves in the lives of returning soldiers in preparation for making a movie about casualty notification officers, the soldiers who knock on the door to bring the grim news of a loved one's death while on military duty. We think of it as an uplifting movie about getting back to life.



When we tell these troops about our movie, most smile bitterly; they know their families were spared that awful encounter -- they got a phone call -- but they imagine their friends' families having their hearts ripped out by two soldiers in Class A uniforms at the door. "The secretary of the Army regrets to inform you ..."



Visiting a military hospital is always an inspiring, shocking, beautiful, complicated experience. I highly recommend it. It's a gift to the soldier, and it's a blessing for the visitor. Those who are in good enough shape to talk take us to the front lines of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom in vivid, visceral detail. We feel privileged to hear their voices crack, to see their eyes fill with tears.



Firefights. IEDs. Accidents. Friendly fire. Boredom. Porn. Burn pits. Torn
What does the media often avoid? What is important and inspiring, but not pretty? What does he say visiting soldiers in hospital is?
Individual tales Visiting a military hospital always an inspiring, shocking, beautiful, complicated experience.
question: What does the media often avoid?, answer: Individual tales | question: What is important and inspiring, but not pretty?, answer: Visiting a military hospital | question: What does he say visiting soldiers in hospital is?, answer: always an inspiring, shocking, beautiful, complicated experience.