In the days after 9/11, Elliot Ackerman went back to 'Band of Brothers' and asked whether the kind of heroes it portrayed still existed. Later, after serving in war, he says he discovered that they did.
Ackerman writes that he first watched the HBO series the Sunday before the attacks, as a college student who had taken over the television in his apartment for the premiere. The 10-part show, which aired between September and November 2001, follows a regiment of the 101st Airborne Division during World War II and is based on the journals, letters, and interviews of those soldiers.
He says the series carried no cynicism and no equivocation about America’s role in the world. At the time, he believed his own future would be spent as part of a 'band of brothers' as he headed into the Marines through Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps.
More than two decades later, Ackerman sees the show as a barometer of how much the country has changed. He says the United States is now more skeptical of its role in the world and more clear-eyed about the costs of war, even though an all-volunteer military insulates most citizens from those costs.
He also says the country’s appetite to export its ideals abroad has diminished. He points to scandals from Abu Ghraib to Edward Snowden’s leaks and the fall of Kabul, Afghanistan, as events that left the country’s democratic evangelists in disarray.
The result, in his telling, is that a United States in which 'Band of Brothers' has near-universal appeal is now a distant memory. What once read as a shared civic ideal now feels like a museum piece from a different republic.
That matters. A country that forgets the cost of war does not become safer; it becomes careless. But a country that cannot honor sacrifice without embarrassment loses something else: the moral language needed to defend itself when defense is necessary. Say it plainly. The record is public. The question is not whether heroes exist. It is whether the institutions and culture still know how to recognize them without apology.
