"How to Die in Oregon" plays on HBO on May 27, 29 and 31 and June 1 and 6.
Click here for HBO showtimes.

I've been encouraged to write autobiographically in this forum, so bear with me, dear reader. We've barely been introduced, and this time it's personal. I'll be sharing some thoughts about HBO's extraordinary new documentary "How to Die in Oregon", but first, allow me this indulgence:

When my father died four months ago at the age of 79, I sat beside him in my wheelchair as his death drew near. I couldn't hold his hand and he couldn't hold mine, so I gently touched the parchment-like skin of dad's withered right arm while my older brother, standing on the other side of the bed, leaned over and quietly suggested to our father that this was "a good time to go."

Dad must have agreed, because a few seconds later, he did.

He went gently and peacefully after many hours of slow, labored breathing. Only three weeks had passed since he'd been definitively diagnosed with bowel cancer. In a case of fortunate timing, we'd brought him home from the hospital about 30 hours earlier; we knew he preferred to die at home. Apart from the morphine drip we'd been trained to operate by compassionate hospice-care advisors, there were no lethal drugs or physicians involved.

(Above: Jerry and Jeff Shannon, 2009)

Beginning a new column devoted to films available via Video on Demand in all its forms.

● "How to Fold a Flag"
● "We Are the Night"

To say that Javorn Drummond, Jon Powers, Michael Goss and Stuart Wilf come from different walks of life is something of an understatement. If they hadn't served together in Iraq in 2003-04, they never would've met. Now they're back home, separated by geography, uneasy peace and haunting memories of what they saw and did during a war they determined to be pointless. They might meet again someday -- or not -- but they share a bond of life, death and military service that they'll take to their graves.

These are the guys we got to know in "Gunner Palace," the superb 2005 documentary co-directed by the husband-and-wife team of Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein. They defended America as soldiers in the Army's 2/3 Field Artillery Division, never quite sure what they were killing or dying for. There was a fifth "star" in the film, Ben Colgan, who sacrificed his elite Delta Forces post to join the artillery unit in Baghdad. Then he sacrificed his life to an IED.