this is how i'm going to celebrate veteran's day. you know, there are alot of solid movies that portray different aspects of war realistically, but alot of them skip over the boredom and the downtime. alot of them fail to acknowledge that for every soldier out there doing the gung-ho stuff there are a ton of airmen, sailors and soldiers who have a very unexciting, monotonous life far away from home supporting those few guys who are doing the normal rambo stuff.

i have a friend who i went to high school with who got back from iraq just as i was headed over. unlike me, he was stuck in a support role on the same base and hated his entire year deployment. he had an awful chain of command that didn't instill a sense of purpose in the troops. they didn't give them a "big picture" view of what they were doing over there and how they were supporting other guys and so to him, that was a year wasted.

i was largely support as well, but i was supporting tactical teams at the company level and i farmed myself out to other units as well, so i did get to go outside the wire and meet and greet locals and dodge bad stuff and lead some combat patrols. i was plugged in enough to get the big picture as well, how what we were doing affected what was going on in our region of the country.

this movie does a great job catching that boredom and the despair of wanting to contribute and feel important. and it's as true for thousands of soldiers fulfilling logistical roles in iraq and afghanistant and kuwait and other places around the world today as it was after WWII.