Today’s Vets Bring Their Baggage Home
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Sixty years ago, William Wyler won an Oscar for his direction of “The Best Years of Our Lives,” which also won Best Picture and Best Screenplay (by Robert E. Sherwood). It was widely regarded as giving a voice to the interests and concerns of the American veterans returning from World War II — including those who, like one of its stars (Harold Russell), had come home maimed and disabled.
Watching it today, you may be struck by how desperately its veterans — including poor Mr. Russell, who lost both his hands in an accident — want to be reintegrated into society, to pick up the lives they left before the war with as few changes as possible. The word “normal” resounds throughout the film as if it described some beautiful dream.
In this respect if in no other,”The Best Years of Our Lives”is the polar opposite of Irwin Winkler’s “Home of the Brave,” which seems to have been modeled on it. Both pictures take a group of veterans from the same hometown and present the difficulties they face upon returning home. But Mr. Winkler’s Iraq vets are (mostly) the enemies of the “normal.”
“You want us to come back like nothing ever happened,” the traumatized combat surgeon played by Samuel L. Jackson growls to his long-suffering wife (Victoria Rowell).”You don’t want to get your hands dirty with the details.”
Well, yes, as a matter of fact, that’s exactly what we do want. Some of us, anyway. And it was once what the veterans themselves wanted, too. But things have changed since 1946.
There are, I think, two reasons for this. One is that, about halfway through the intervening 60 years, the imaginations of both the general culture and of Hollywood were captured by a new idea, an illness first diagnosed in the aftermath of Vietnam called post-traumatic stress disorder. Since then, you would be hard put to it to find a war movie in which one or more of the characters didn’t suffer from the psychological aftereffects of combat. To judge by the movies, war is now less a political or military matter than an excuse for loss of impulse control.
The second reason is that both Hollywood and the larger media culture of which it is a part are probably at least as anti-war today as they were pro-war in 1946. In one scene in the earlier film, a Nazi sympathizer suggests that America fought the wrong enemy and that the sacrifices of her soldiers had been in vain. One of the sympathetic vets (Dana Andrews) decks him with a single punch to the jaw.
Such straightforward patriotic fervor (as it would have seemed at the time) is long gone from American movies — in case you hadn’t noticed — and the returning heroes today are meant to be admired (like the heroes of the anachronistic “Flags of Our Fathers”) not for their heroic deeds or their patriotism but for their sufferings — and the more so if the sufferings can be portrayed as having been incurred in a bad cause.
In one scene of “Home of the Brave,” Billy (Sam Jones), the troubled son of the troubled surgeon, is sent home from school for wearing a T-shirt with an obscene and insulting message about President Bush. Mr. Jackson’s character, suffering from insomnia, alcoholism, and “anger issues,” which are among the symptoms of PTSD, responds by cursing out the principal.
Then, when his son tells him that “We went over there for oil and the rest is bull—-,” dad doesn’t deny it, though he puts the opinion down to typical teenage rebellion.
Another of the veterans, played by Curtis Jackson, also known as hip-hop star 50 Cent, goes on a rampage with a gun and is shot by police. A third (Brian Presley) assaults his father when he is urged not to show weakness by getting all weepy about a friend who died. Unable to fit back into civilian life, he ends up re-enlisting for a second tour in Iraq.
Only Jessica Biel’s character, a single mother whose loss of a hand to an Improvised Explosive Device makes her possibly more attractive than if she had two hands — and certainly more attractive than if, like Harold Russell, she had none — resembles the heroes of “Best Years” in trying to be normal. And even she pops pills and explains to her adorable moppet: “Mommy just gets a little bit sad sometimes.”
As a result, “Home of the Brave” bears an uncomfortable likeness to one of those disease-of-the-week daytime soap operas. So much dysfunction, so little time! It’s one thing to recognize that warriors come home scarred by the war and quite another to milk their sufferings out of a combination of voyeurism and pity.
Pity is, of course, just what the heroes of “The Best Years of Our Lives” didn’t want. They wanted to be normal — by which they meant acting, in Samuel L. Jackson’s scornful phrase, “like nothing ever happened.”
Fredric March’s character in the earlier film is as much an alcoholic as Mr. Jackson’s, but never is it suggested that his drinking is a reason for pity or compassion. On the contrary, the others only admire his capacity. “He can take it,” one of his comrades says.
This could sum up the whole movie — as it could the ethos that got us through World War II. “Home of the Brave,” by contrast, tells us that its heroes can’t take it. They have to “act out” — and it’s all somebody else’s fault when they do. Could this have anything to do with the fact that it now looks as if we don’t have what it takes to get us through the current war?