The film follows a group of soldiers from the Guard Hussars Regiment who are on their first mission in Helmand Province at a forward operating base near Gereshk named FOB Armadillo.

The film depicts them as dividing their leisure time between maintaining their equipment and working out, calling home, playing shooter games and watching pornographic videos amongst other things.

Back at base the patrol members congratulate each other on the morning's work and there is a debriefing with accounts of at least one Taliban fighter supposedly found alive but severely wounded in the ditch.

Later two of the soldiers on the patrol are awarded medals and the film concludes with scenes of jubilant homecomings and, for some, a return to civilian life.

The website's consensus reads: "Capturing both the lulls and terror during warfare, Armadillo is a viscerally filmed documentary that brings audiences alarmingly close to the frontlines of combat.

Writing in The Globe and Mail, Guy Dixon remarks "there's another controversy of the more cinematic kind: While the footage is expertly photographed, all the different uses of filters and postproduction colour correction (to say nothing of the superb sound) – which gives the film an almost Apocalypse Now quality at times – is disturbing when we're talking not about the mythology and madness of war, but about showing real, dead people in a ditch or actual children running from fighting.

[8] The film generated a brief political controversy in Denmark when the Danish Socialist People's Party accused the soldiers of deliberately breaking the rules of engagement during one of the firefights, and demanded an investigation.

[9] Following procedure, the Danish Defence Judge Advocate Corps conducted an independent investigation, and the soldiers were cleared of any wrongdoing.