Yes it sounds like an outrageous nonsequitur, but bear with it. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s new book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power includes a passage in the epilogue that makes the parallel. In the book, Maddow makes the case that the military has become so isolated from the democratic process that Americans no longer feel the strain of protracted war in their everyday lives (unlike the World Wars I and II), and as a result, the end of a war such as Iraq in December barely registered in the national consciousness.
[A]s the country learned to be untroubled by the fact we had troops at war, troops coming home from those wars learned to look out for themselves. “It’s like AIDS was 30 years ago,” Iraq veteran Paul Reickhoff told me in 2011. “It’s a huge crisis for us, but no one else in the country thinks they’re us. No one even thinks they’re like us.” Shortly after his return from Baghdad in 2004, Rieckhoff founded Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the first and largest group of veterans of our post-9/11 wars.
This really resonated, given that two of our upcoming films intersect with this idea. The first, Oscar nominee Hell and Back Again (premiering May 24), is about a soldier coming home wounded from Afghanistan and struggling with a sense of alienation from day-to-day American life.
On June 7, we’ll bring you the critically acclaimed We Were Here, an examination of the early years of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, and the remarkable ways the community rallied to care for its own.
It is organizations such as the IAVA (veterans and their allies helping returning veterans) and the Shanti Project (San Franciscans providing dignity and services for terminally ill AIDS patients in the 1980s) that hold communities together and help them survive, leaving no soldier behind on the home front.