Operation Iraqi Freedom
The New Forgotten War?
Dr. Marjorie Galelli
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About a year ago, in a room full of military historians and a large number of veterans, I asked the question, “What is the emblematic movie of Operation Iraqi Freedom?” An answer burst from the crowd: “War Machine!” It was immediately followed by a correction, “That one is about Afghanistan, actually.” This short exchange perfectly encapsulated my point. For World War II, there are movies like Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). The Vietnam War has Platoon (1986) and Apocalypse Now (1979).1 But what are the movies that instantly come to mind when people think of the Iraq War? Apparently, a movie whose plot is actually set in Afghanistan. And if that is the case for people whose professional lives are intricately connected to the military, what does it mean for the American public at large?
In a country where less than 1 percent of the population serves in the Armed Forces, most people’s knowledge and understanding of the wars of the last fifty years comes from what they see on television. According to a study by the American Historical Association, a large majority of people rely on either television news or fictional movies and television shows to learn about the past—62 and 66 percent, respectively.2 When there are no such works of fiction for people to turn to in order to make sense of an event, does a whole chapter of the country’s history simply vanish from popular consciousness? Has the Iraq War become the new forgotten war?
The U.S. war in Iraq is now well in our rearview. Many, if not most, of those who fought in the war have left the service, and those who sent them there are no longer in office. By any standard, it is part of history. And yet, historians have been conspicuously reluctant to tackle the subject—in no small part because most of the sources a historian would typically rely on are still classified.3 Works of fiction benefit from much more leeway, even when stories are “inspired by true events,” and sure enough, there have been far more movies about or set during Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) than historical monographs. By my count, between 2006 and 2022, no less than twenty movies have been released in which the Iraq War played either a significant part in the plot or constituted the main backdrop.4 Nine of them came out even before the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2011, and six of them were released in 2017 on the ten-year anniversary of the surge in Iraq.5 Still, none of these films stand out as THE Iraq War movie. The lack of movies popularly associated with the Iraq War (i.e., movies that immediately come to mind when a person thinks about it) arguably stems from the lack of consensus around the conflict, whether among politicians, journalists, or veterans. Over two decades after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, there is still no overarching narrative that neatly encapsulates the war’s story.6 Even Hollywood has failed to come up with one.
One of the first movies set during the Iraq War was at once the most popular and possibly the most controversial. When The Hurt Locker debuted in 2008, it was acclaimed by critics and the public but reviled by veterans. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Jeremy Renner alongside Anthony Mackie, the movie won six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, making Bigelow the first woman to win the award.7 And yet, in just about any conversation with someone who served in the war, the movie is derided as absurd and inaccurate. These widely diverging reactions raise questions regarding the audience. Who are war movies intended for? Are they meant for the people who fought in the conflict or for civilians? And even if civilians are indeed the target audience, what degree of inaccuracy, if any, is acceptable in the service of a compelling story? These questions are likely to elicit different answers depending on who is responding. I would argue that because so many people do garner their understanding of the past—including military interventions—from works of fiction, simply dismissing these movies as inaccurate is unhelpful. Rather, it is important to analyze the way the Iraq War is represented in popular culture to understand how the public’s perspective on the conflict is shaped.
Coming Home: The Main Battle?
The litany of critiques voiced by veterans regarding The Hurt Locker is almost always followed by a mention of the movie’s one redeeming quality: the cereal aisle scene. At the very end of the movie, the main character, Sgt. 1st Class William James played by Jeremy Renner, is back stateside after his deployment as an explosive ordnance disposal technician and finds himself struggling to readjust to home life. While grocery shopping with his family, his ex-wife asks him to get some cereal and meet her and their son at checkout. We then see James standing in the cereal aisle attempting to make a decision in the face of an overwhelming number of options, trying to come to grips with the contrast between the abundance in American society and the life he led just a few days prior in war-ridden Iraq. Later that day, he tells his infant son that he thinks the only thing he loves is being a soldier. The movie ends with James, back in uniform, landing in Iraq for another tour. The Hurt Locker set out to be a true action movie, packed with bravery, bravado, and explosions. But in the end, it is the two minutes the main character spends in an American supermarket that resonated the most.
A survey of OIF movies quickly reveals service members’ readjustment to life on the home front as a recurring theme. While the movie industry seems to struggle to come up with a clear narrative for the Iraq War—why it was fought and how it unfolded—the depiction of the people who fought in the war is far more consistent. In the age of the all-volunteer force, even though every person serving in the military chooses to put on the uniform, soldiers, marines, airmen, and sailors are almost systematically portrayed as victims. The main plight of returning soldiers, according to Hollywood, is psychological. Over 1.5 million Americans served in Iraq between the 2003 invasion and the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2011.8 According to a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) estimate, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) could affect up to 29 percent of veterans who served in OIF.9 Other studies offer lower numbers but still suggest a rate of at least 13.5 percent.10 In other words, up to one-third of veterans could suffer from PTSD at some point in their lives. Numbers are even higher when veterans are asked about their experiences. According to a Pew Research Center survey, “about half of post-9/11 veterans (47%) say they had emotionally traumatic or distressing experiences” and 36 percent report having suffered from PTSD as a result.11 According to the same survey, “about half of post-9/11 veterans say it was somewhat (32%) or very (16%) difficult for them to readjust to civilian life after their military service.”12 Hollywood movies about the Iraq War typically home in on these veterans’ stories.
As early as 2006, Home of the Brave made the reintegration of service members into civilian society the central focus of its plot. Contrary to The Hurt Locker, only the first twenty minutes of the movie are spent alongside U.S. troops in Iraq, the rest of the movie follows four National Guard soldiers as they return to their civilian lives in Spokane, Washington. Each of the main characters suffers from flashbacks from the war and struggles to get back to their life out of uniform.
Spc. Tommy Yates came back from the war alone. His best friend was killed just a couple of weeks before the unit was set to return to the United States, and Tommy’s girlfriend sent him a “Dear John” letter while he was overseas. Trying to resume his life nonetheless, Tommy returns to his old workplace, a small gun store, only to find that his former boss filled his position. “You were gone a while Tommy, like, a year,” his boss tells him. “There’s kind of a law, says you have to hold my job until I get back … You knew I was coming back eventually,” Tommy insists, only for his boss to intimate that he didn’t know for sure Tommy wouldn’t get killed.
Sgt. Vanessa Price, played by Jessica Biel, lost a hand to an IED and, once home, can’t help but feel alienated from all the people she used to know before her deployment. “I see all these people driving these gas-guzzling SUVs, getting their frappuccinos from Starbucks, doing all this crap with their normal lives,” she tells Tommy, “and they don’t give a shit what’s going on over there.”
Spc. Jamal Aiken, portrayed by 50 Cent, can’t make peace with accidentally shooting an unarmed Iraqi woman while clearing a house. After struggling for months with his discharge paperwork and VA bureaucracy, he is killed by the police when he takes his ex-girlfriend hostage at her workplace.
Finally, in a drunken speech over Thanksgiving dinner, Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Lt. Col./Dr. Will Marsh, sums up what appears to be the core message of the movie. He describes the soldiers who serve in Iraq as “boys who just wanna come home. And they do come home. Maimed and haunted and fucked up, if they come home at all.” Home of the Brave was an unconditional flop at the box office. In his New York Times review, film critic Stephen Holden called the movie “an honorable dud.”13 Holden described the movie as “premature because so many thousands of American troops remain in Iraq with no timetable for an exit, and stale because the drama suggests a pallid imitation of the real thing so easily found in documentaries.”14 The review went on to suggest that “when the time comes for Hollywood to take on the war in Iraq, those documentaries are going to pose a serious challenge to filmmakers seeking credibility.”15 Still, Hollywood kept making movies about service members and the war, and for the next two decades, their representations did not diverge from the tropes used in Home of the Brave in any significant respect.
PTSD is a key storyline in Thank You for Your Service (2017). In many ways similar to Home of the Brave, Thank You for Your Service follows Sgt. Adam “Shoe” Schumann (Miles Teller) and his two teammates, Spc. Tausolo Aieti and Pfc. Will Waller, as they return home to Kansas after their last deployment—a story inspired by true events. On the plane ride home, Waller can’t contain his excitement about his upcoming wedding, but his fiancée is not there to welcome him with the other families once they land. He gets home by taxi only to find his apartment empty—Tracey left him, taking his money, furniture, and the daughter he had been raising as his own. A couple of days later, but only twenty-four minutes into the movie, he drives to Topeka and confronts her at the bank where she works. Tracey insists that their relationship is over and tells Waller to go. “Where do I go?” he asks, just before pulling out his gun and shooting himself in the head.
Thank You for Your Service, like most of the recent Iraq War movies, emphasizes the link between physical injuries and mental health issues. As Shoe wonders why Waller didn’t tell his teammates that he was struggling, Aieti retorts, “He got blown up seven times. He was fucked up. Normal people don’t get blown up.”
Sgt. Will Gardner (2019) similarly focuses on the struggle of a veteran upon returning from deployment. It highlights the toll of traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and service members’ struggle with invisible wounds. When Will meets his estranged son, he explains to him that he “got caught in a couple explosions. They injured my brain. They call it TBI.” In Thank You for Your Service, Aieti too is eventually diagnosed with TBI, preventing him from reenlisting. In addition to the injury itself and the memory-loss and violent episodes it causes, the invisible nature of his wound is something Aieti struggles with. “Nobody knows you fought unless you got your fucking arm blown off. I’d take it. I’d rather be a hero with my ass blown off than this shit. I don’t even feel like me anymore,” he tells Shoe as they are driving.
Movies also often turn to the trope of the VA’s failure to offer support to veterans once they leave the service. This theme closely matches the prevailing opinion among post-9/11 veterans that the VA is not doing a great job of helping veterans.16 In Sgt. Will Gardner, one of the veterans Will helps along the way shifts blame away from the military onto the VA: “The military, man, they gave my dad an education, put food on the table. So I ain’t talk shit about the military. But the VA, the VA’s a fucking shit show, man.” The movies do not criticize the military, only the civilian administration and bureaucracy that follow life in uniform. In Thank You for Your Service, Aieti and Shoe eventually decide that they need to get help and turn to the VA only to be confronted with an arcane bureaucracy and months of backlog. When Shoe insists that Aieti needs to see someone as soon as possible, a psychiatrist who overheard his conversation with the clerk offers to see Aieti during her lunch break. We later learn that she sees patients during her lunch break just about every day. In other words, individuals are not responsible for veterans’ struggles, it is the whole system that is broken, despite the selflessness of the medical staff.
Sgt. Will Gardner also seeks to shed light on the homelessness crisis among veterans.17 Nearly all the service members Will meets on his journey across the United States are unhoused—save for the ghost of his friend, a retired marine bartender, and a young servicewoman who buys him a drink. Anyone watching the movie would be hard pressed to imagine people surviving military service unscathed. These representations reflect the 43 percent of post-9/11 veterans who say that they received less help from the government than they should have.18 The movie ends with Will panhandling on the steps of a war memorial in Washington, D.C., trying to get enough money to return to New Mexico to see his son. The message is clear: the Nation has failed him. Time and again, Iraq War movies endeavor to emphasize the systemic failures that affect service members and veterans in the United States without, however, engaging much with the larger question: why they are deploying and fighting abroad in the first place. The main battle, Hollywood suggests, takes place on the home front.
Civilians, Service Members, and Veterans: A Contested Relationship
The contested relationship among civilians, service members, and veterans is a recurring element in Iraq War movies. As is the custom, even characters who voice concerns and reservations about the war in Iraq still revere the service members who fight in it.19 This American phenomenon finds its roots in the Reagan presidency that established “support for ‘the troops’—as opposed to actual service with them—as the new standard of civic responsibility,” as historian Andrew Bacevich argues.20 The 2022 Netflix rom-com Purple Hearts explicitly (some might say forcefully) makes the case for civilians supporting the troops regardless of their own feelings about the war or political inclinations.21 Cassie Salazar, one of the two main characters, starts the movie as a vocal, left-leaning liberal, opposed to the U.S. military’s involvement in foreign nations and dead set against getting involved with servicemen. If she marries Lance Cpl. Luke Morrow just days before he is set to deploy to Iraq, it is only as a last-resort move to secure health insurance and obtain treatment for her diabetes (meanwhile Luke plans to use the additional money to pay back his debt to a drug dealer). By the end of the movie, however, Cassie has reconsidered her stance on the military and even fulfills her dream of becoming a renowned artist thanks to her hit ballad “Come Back Home.” She wrote the song during Luke’s deployment in Iraq and sang it to his unit over a video call. Cassie eventually dedicates the song “to all you American heroes” and hangs the Stars and Stripes next to the Black Lives Matter and rainbow flags already floating from her balcony. We don’t know whether she changed her mind about the war, but one thing’s for sure: she now supports the troops.
The imperative to respect the troops regardless of an individual’s feelings about the war is a phenomenon that goes way back in Hollywood.22 However, such reverence has remained superficial, at best.23 In the post-9/11 era, thanking the troops for their service has become so automatic that an exercise that was always primarily performative has lost most, if not all, its meaning. The shallowness of American society’s “support for the troops” is clear in The Lucky Ones (2008). The movie tells the story of three soldiers on leave from Iraq after getting wounded who unexpectedly embark on a road trip from New York to Las Vegas. Throughout their journey, they receive help from strangers—in no small part because of their status as service members—and each time they thank their benefactors they are met with an emphatic, “No, thank you.” In itself, this interaction is not surprising. Yet, for every civilian that shows the main characters deference because of their military status, there are others who don’t hesitate to disparage their service. When the trio makes a pit stop in Indiana, several college-aged women make fun of Colee’s limp (Rachel McAdams). When she explains that she got shot in the leg while serving overseas, the lead mean girl retorts, “That wasn’t very smart, was it?” sparking a bar fight.
Other movies also suggest that at least some civilians turn their anger toward the war against the soldiers fighting it. In Home of the Brave, the conflict between civilians and veterans is embodied by the relationship between Lt. Col. Marsh and his teenage son. During an argument, Marsh suggests that there are “bad guys” in Iraq, but his son pushes back asking “Dad, what bad guys? What is it? A Schwarzenegger movie? Why don’t you just admit it: we went over there for oil and everything else is just bullshit.” Despite its effort to show a multitude of perspectives on the Iraq War and its consequences, the movie failed to move past the stereotype of the damaged veteran pitted against civilians who are, at best, naïve and will never know what it felt to “have been there.”
Civilians are not the only ones with qualms about the Iraq War. According to Hollywood movies, unlike many of their drafted forbearers, OIF service members rarely serve in the armed forces out of a sense of duty or patriotism. In The Lucky Ones, Rachel McAdams’s character explains why her best friend, Randy, enlisted, saying that he was trying to escape the police after robbing a casino: “He went right into the Army and disappeared. It was the perfect getaway.” At the end of the movie, one of the other main characters, desperate to find a way to pay for his son’s college education, ends up reupping to get the reenlistment bonus. Megan Leavey is the eponymous character of the 2017 movie based on a real-life Marine Corps corporal. From the very start of the movie, we learn that she only joined the Marine Corps to escape her small town after her best friend died of a drug overdose. “In the end, you don’t leave because you have somewhere to go. You leave because there’s nothing keeping you there,” she says. In Sand Castle, released that same year, Pvt. Matt Ocre enlisted before 9/11 to pay for college and never expected to see combat. Written by Chris Roessner, an Iraq War veteran, the movie shows Ocre breaking his own hand while deployed in the Gulf in a failed attempt to avoid participating in the invasion of Iraq. Most movies suggest that although part of the all-volunteer force, service members don’t have much of a choice when it comes to joining the military.
In many ways, the true heroes in Sand Castle are not the American soldiers, but local Iraqis who choose to stand up against the insurgents and help U.S. troops restore the infrastructure destroyed during the invasion by repairing the local water pumping station. The depiction of Iraqi characters in Sand Castle creates a sharp contrast with the standard depiction of Iraqis in Hollywood movies. According to Bacevich, Hollywood has “mastered the art of interpreting history in ways that express the popular mood of the moment. Especially when it comes to war, the packaging typically involves putting the United States at center stage, while marginalizing or distorting the role of others and ignoring details that don’t fit into an American-centric narrative.”24 It is therefore unsurprising that, out of all the movies on the list, Sand Castle is one of the very few that spends any significant amount of time reflecting on the toll of the war on the Iraqi people and features Iraqis as more than background characters.
Save for a handful of interpreters helping American forces conduct searches and man checkpoints, and a few children who are alternatively friendly or antagonistic toward U.S. troops, the vast majority of Iraqis in the movies are only there to play the part of the faceless, nameless enemy. They are shadows shooting at U.S. soldiers from distant ridges and rooftops before disappearing into the population. Hollywood usually does not attempt to give them a backstory or a voice as that would require engaging with the war’s rationale. The Wall (2017), however, stands out. One of the movies’ main characters is an Iraqi sniper—Juba. Even though he is one of only three characters, we never see him. The renowned marksman is an “angel of death,” a ghost. Throughout the movie, Juba is a disembodied voice over the radio, insisting on talking with Sgt. Isaac, an American soldier he pinned behind a stone wall. Yet the conversation between the two men opens a window into the motivations of Juba, who claims he is “just a regular Iraqi man, a civilian.” We later learn that he used to be a teacher in Baghdad until his school got bombed. Isaac surmises that Juba received training from the U.S. military before using it against Americans whom he accuses of being terrorists. “You are the one who has come to another man’s country. Camouflaged yourself in his land, in his soil. From where I am sitting, you look very much like the terrorist,” he tells Isaac. In the movie’s last scene, Isaac and the audience realize that the whole time Juba has been using details of his conversation with Isaac to impersonate him over the radio, interacting with headquarters in order to draw more U.S. troops to the area. The movie ends with the sniper victorious in his own country, having shot down the two rescue helicopters and continuing his deception over the radio, this time pretending to be one of the helicopter pilots. In many ways, the movie presents him as more of a righteous hero than U.S. service members: it is, after all, easier to root for a lone defender than the invaders.
Conclusion
In the last twenty years, Hollywood has emphasized victimhood over valor. In 2005, Bacevich wrote that American politicians and purveyors of popular culture have contrived “a sentimentalized version of the American military experience and an idealized image of the American soldier.”25 When it comes to movies about the war in Iraq though, service members’ status does not derive from their actions. They are not so much heroes but martyrs, unfortunate victims of their circumstances. Watching Home of the Brave, we are left wondering what actually constitutes bravery. Is it simply going on living after serving? As it turns out, the movie’s poster sheds light on that exact question. Right under the title, it reads, “The Final Test of Courage Is Coming Home.” The movie concludes with Tommy Yates writing a letter to his parents after reenlisting in which he explains, “Maybe the leaders of our country didn’t know what they were getting into. Maybe the people don’t want us there. Maybe this whole thing is just making it worse. But even after all that, I can’t stay behind knowing there are soldiers over there getting attacked every day and dying every day. I don’t feel like it’s wrong of me for wanting to go back over there and help them.” He is “not trying to be noble and brave,” just “to do the best job [he knows] how to.” In the Iraq War era, Hollywood doesn’t show soldiers fighting for a cause, the point isn’t to win a war or (re)build a nation, but simply to fight to ensure fellow soldiers come home to face their final battle, reintegrating into American society. In a well-meaning attempt to raise awareness and shine a light on the plight of veterans in the United States—whether it be PTSD, TBI, or homelessness—Hollywood films end up telling a one-sided, often stereotypical story that distorts the lived experience of service members.
At the same time, this narrow focus on the plight of service members allows most movies to abstain from all but the most superficial commentary on the war. The omission is no accident and is not new. As historian Christian Appy explained back in the 1990s, “By focusing on what people suffered or endured in foreign lands … you need not examine what they were doing there in the first place.”26 Iraq War movies encourage the audience to empathize with the struggles of the men and women who fight in the Armed Forces and to support them once they leave the service. But a separate encouragement to reflect upon the rationale for the war or the role and responsibilities of citizens toward its leaders and the Nation’s foreign policy is conspicuously absent. The American public has become so accustomed to seeing U.S. troops in the desert that movies hardly spend any time explaining why they are there in the first place. Foreign policy decisions and the consequences of combat for veterans are treated as totally disconnected. In the end, Hollywood’s message suggests that as long as the Nation treats its service members and veterans better, there will be little need for people to think about (let alone question) the wars they are ordered to fight.
Notes 
- There are, of course, many more movies that people associate with these conflicts; these are just a few examples.
- Peter Burkholder and Dana Schaffer, History, the Past, and Public Culture: Results from a National Survey (American Historical Association, 2021), 18, https://www.historians.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/History-Past-Public-Culture-Survey-Report-2021-08.pdf.
- For an argument on why historians should be writing about the Iraq War, see Marjorie Galelli, “The Last Word: It’s Been Twenty Years— Time for Historians to Turn to Iraq,” Passport 54, no. 1 (April 2023): 63, https://www.shafr.org/assets/docs/Passport/2023/passport-04-2023-last-word.pdf.
- While there have been numerous TV shows in which the Iraq War constitutes a recurring element of the plot, for the purpose of this article I am focusing solely on movies.
- Home of the Brave, directed by Irwin Winkler (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2006); In the Valley of Elah, directed by Paul Haggis (Warner Independent Pictures, 2007); Stop Loss, directed by Kimberly Pierce (Paramount Pictures, 2008); The Hurt Locker, directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Voltage Pictures, 2008); The Lucky Ones, directed by Neil Burger (QED International, 2008); Taking Chance, directed by Ross Katz (Civil Dawn Pictures, 2009); The Messenger, directed by Oren Moverman (Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2009); Green Zone, directed by Paul Greengrass (Universal Pictures, 2010); The A-Team, directed by Joe Carnahan (Dune Entertainment, 2010); The Lucky One, directed by Scott Hicks (Village Roadshow Pictures, 2012); American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood (Village Roadshow Pictures, 2014); War Dogs, directed by Todd Phillips (RatPac-Dune Entertainment, 2016); Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, directed by Ang Lee (TriStar Pictures, 2016); Megan Leavey, directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite (LD Entertainment, 2017); Sand Castle, directed by Fernando Coimbra (Treehouse Pictures, 2017); Shock and Awe, directed by Rob Reiner (Acacia Entertainment, 2017); Thank You for Your Service, directed by Jason Hall (DreamWorks Pictures, 2017); The Wall, directed by Doug Liman (Roadside Attractions, 2017); The Yellow Birds, directed by Alexandre Moors (Cinelou Films, 2017); Sgt. Will Gardner, directed by Max Martini (Mona Vista Productions, 2019); Purple Hearts, directed by Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum (Netflix, 2022).
- According to some scholars, the reason why Hollywood “largely moved away from more traditional films featuring infantry units and conventional military campaigns,” is a result of twenty-first-century wars being “deeply unpopular.” Scott Laderman, “War and Film,” in At War: The Military and American Culture in the Twentieth Century and Beyond, ed. David Kieran and Edwin Martini (Rutgers University Press, 2018), 326. For others, the lack of narrative for the war in Iraq is a consequence of “how systemic and devastating its effects have been on the very fabric of American society.” Zaynab Quadri et al., “Shock and Awe Revisited: Legacies of the Iraq War 20 Years Later,” Passport 54, no. 2 (September 2023): 75, https://www.shafr.org/assets/docs/Passport/2023/passport-09-2023-shock-awe.pdf.
- “The Hurt Locker,” IMDb, accessed 15 August 2025, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0887912/.
- “VFW Honors America’s Iraq War Veterans,” Veterans of Foreign Wars, 14 December 2023, https://www.vfw.org/media-and-events/latest-releases/archives/2023/12/vfw-honors-americas-iraq-war-veterans.
- “PTSD: National Center for PTSD,” U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, accessed 15 August 2025, https://www.ptsd.va.gov/understand/common/common_veterans.asp.
- Miriam Reisman, “PTSD Treatment for Veterans: What’s Working, What’s New, and What’s Next,” Pharmacy and Therapeutics 41, no. 10 (October 2016): 623.
- Kim Parker et al., The American Veteran Experience and the Post-9/11 Generation: For Many Veterans, Combat Experience Strengthened Them Personally but Also Made the Transition to Civilian Life Difficult (Pew Research Center, 10 September 2019), 13–14, https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2019/09/09.10.19_veteransexperiences_full_report_updated.pdf.
- Parker et al., The American Veteran Experience, 17.
- Stephen Holden, “After Iraq, Struggling on the Home Front,” New York Times, 15 December 2006, sec. E.
- Holden, “After Iraq, Struggling on the Home Front.”
- Holden, “After Iraq, Struggling on the Home Front.”
- Parker et al., The American Veteran Experience, 8.
- According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, in 2024 there were about thirty-three thousand veterans experiencing homelessness. “HUD 2024 Continuum of Care Homeless Assistance Programs Homeless Populations and Subpopulations,” U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 9 December 2024, https://files.hudexchange.info/reports/published/CoC_PopSub_NatlTerrDC_2024.pdf.
- Parker et al., The American Veteran Experience, 24.
- Wilbur J. Scott, “Veterans and Veterans’ Issues,” in At War: The Military and American Culture in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Rutgers University Press, 2018), 135.
- Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2013), 108.
- As the timeframe is not always stated explicitly, the release date of some of the movies, like Purple Hearts, could suggest that the troops depicted were deployed to Iraq as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, rather than Iraqi Freedom.
- Laderman, “War and Film,” 315.
- Peter D. Feaver, Thanks for Your Service: The Causes and Consequences of Public Confidence in the US Military (Oxford University Press, 2023), Kindle.
- Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (Random House, 2016), 56.
- Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 97.
- Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 4.
Dr. Marjorie Galelli is an assistant professor of history at Kansas State University. She is currently working on a book about counterinsurgency during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
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