Movies: On Duty, Honor and Celebrity

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Except that the acclaimed veterans don't want to remember. The hallowed are also the haunted, their nightmares contaminated for decades with the faces of dead comrades. They withdraw into themselves, refuse to speak about the war. They hide their medals as evidence of their crime--that they survived when others didn't. Or did they? Their war experiences make them, in a way, the living dead.

They are also a vanishing breed: the war hero. Soldiers surely acted exemplarily in Korea, and Vietnam, and Iraq, but each of those conflicts exhausted the rooting interest of the American public, which eventually went looking not for battlefield derring-do but for statesmen who could clean up the mess. Eastwood's compassionate, cautionary tale speaks eloquently about a time when America needed heroes, and does so when we are no longer sure what they look like--when the indelible photo op of the Iraq war is from Abu Ghraib.