Troops face new battles stateside

DIRECTOR Irwin Winkler recently saw a group of soldiers being applauded in an airport. “A lot of people think that’s it,” he said. “You return, everybody greets you, there’s a party when you come back.”

But he knew there was much more to it. “You’re left with your own bad memories,” he said. And the task of finding where you fit once back home.

Winkler’s new drama “Home of the Brave,” which opens Dec. 15, follows three soldiers struggling to readjust to life at home after tours in Iraq. The film stars Samuel L. Jackson, Brian Presley, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson and Jessica Biel.

“With the conflict in Iraq going on and on and on, we have more and more soldiers coming back with problems, physical and mental,” said Winkler, who produced “Raging Bull. “So I thought it would be important not to wait five years after the war, which we never know when it’s going to end, to tell the story.”

Presley agreed that coming home was a part of the soldiers’ story worth telling. He plays a soldier who returns to the gun shop where he once worked only to find his job has been permanently filled. “The guy who actually worked at the real gun store pulled me aside and said my character was him. He was in the Marines; he felt it was the only place he belonged. A lot of vets I talked to appreciated that this wasn’t a war-bashing movie from Hollywood, but looked into what it was like coming home.”

Winkler and screenwriter Mark Friedman said that accuracy in depicting both the firefights and the vets’ stateside battles was the top priority. (The Defense Department objected to the script, taking issue with such elements as a scene showing a soldier soldering armor onto his Humvee, something the Army contends doesn’t happen.)

Interviews with soldiers yielded scenes such as one in which two vets who have just been introduced casually discuss their VA-approved antidepressant regimens.

“There are people dying over there every day, people in harm’s way, so you want to get it right,” Friedman said. “You owe it to these people. The movie isn’t just for the people who weren’t there, it’s for the people who were.”

-- Michael Ordona