"They make prosthetic high heels, I checked into it," says Maj. Tammy Duckworth near the beginning of "In Conflict," her voice trembling with optimism or rage, who knows? "Not three-inch stilettos, but at least an inch or two of heel. I'll be good to go."

Duckworth, a McKinley High School and University of Hawai'i graduate, is one of the 16 veterans, all of them casualties of the Iraq war, who tell their stories during this culture project presentation in New York's Greenwich Village.

This is the same group that commissioned George Packer's electrifying "Betrayed" last spring. "In Conflict," developed by director Douglas C. Wager from Yvonne Latty's riveting book of interviews with soldiers, brings us face to face with what the American media have mostly denied us: the anguished words and mutilated bodies of young people returned from the front. Like Duckworth, a pilot who came home minus her legs and most of her right arm.

"I miss my body," says the flier, played with beguiling artlessness by Suyeon Kim. "I miss my strong, healthy body."

Scenes with the vets are interspersed with filmed introductions in which Latty speaks of meetings with her subjects, some of whom were hard to track down, while others were eager to share.

Not all of them are amputees, at least not visibly. Slugging from a bottle of vodka, Army PFC Herold Noel says, plainly, "The hardest thing about being in Iraq is being in Iraq," before telling the story of a mother and her baby's horrific deaths.

"I came back an amputee but you can't see my amputation," he says, woozily jabbing at his head "My amputation is up here."

"In Conflict" comes from Temple University, where Wager, a former artistic director of Washington's Arena Stage who now runs the school's theater program. Kim, Damon Williams (who plays Herold with conviction) and the rest of the company are student actors in multiple roles; they have youth and enthusiasm where more seasoning might be wanted.

But even coming from the mouths of babes, the words of these soldiers gleaning grains of hope in a landscape of despair find their targets: You won't soon forget them.