As a human being, I will never pretend to understand war. I’ve never been to war. I will *probably* never go to war. I will never see the world through the eyes of someone who has been through that experience. But, like any red-blooded millennial male who came of age in the George W. Bush years, I have many close friends I care about who have been there. So has actor Miles Teller, 3o:
“You’ve either been to war or you haven’t, man. You can’t fucking understand it if you haven’t.”
That’s the most important thing to know about his new movie, Thank You For Your Service. There are two theres there.
You won’t truly understand Thank You For Your Service unless you’ve been there, meaning war. There is also being the living hell of coming home from combat, often as a young man or woman with the rest of their lives in-front of them.
Thank You For Your Service isn’t a war movie fetishizing the drama of battle or rah-rah shock-and-awe patriotism. It’s an after-war movie showing the hell of servicemen and women coming home to grapple with piecing their lives together, from estranged family and friends to unemployment and VA lines. It’s a movie with an purpose, albeit quite uncomfortable to watch unfold through the story of Adam Schumann, whose infantry battalion suffered eleven causalities in George W.
Bush’s 2007 “Surge” in Iraq.
