USA. Atlanta, Georgia. 2016. On the set of the movie Thank You for Your Service. The movie was based on the superb David Finkel book about a unit of American sol- diers struggling to adapt to life at home after a violent deployment to Iraq. It is a sober account of the long-term psychological trauma of conflict. The film had a star cast, but only earned back $9 million of its $20 million budget.
Few movies about Iraq and Afghanistan have been financially successful. The lucrative ones have been action-based and only hint at the moral ambiguity, politics, and history behind the conflict. In the American-made movies, the Iraqis and Afghans are marginal figures at best, and often subject to endemic Hollywood stereotypes. In a study of 1,200 depictions of Arabs and Muslims in film, academic and U.S. Army veteran Jack Shaheen found that 97% of the portrayals are unfavorable: “At most, three dozen or so had balance, or what I would call positive images. In the rest of them, Arabs are either terrorists or shady sheikhs or people you would not want to associate with. Those images continue to pervade our psyches.” Those sentiments certainly infected me. It took until I stopped embedding in the bubble of the American military to get to know Iraqis and Afghans and fall in love with the beauty and hospitality of the culture.
I always thought that if I were to make a war story about these conflicts, it would be about a unit that goes on patrol. Their vehicle gets blown to pieces by an improvised explosive hidden in the road, burning to death several soldiers and taking the limbs off of others, who barely survive. The rest of the unit searches desperately for something to shoot.
They fail and return to base, where they go to the dining hall and decide which of the ten varieties of pie they’d like to eat.