Home of the Brave

A 2006 film starring Samuel L. Jackson and Jessica Biel about a group of National Guardsmen serving in Iraq who are caught in an ambush and a fierce firefight during their last mission before being rotated back home. The bulk of the film deals with the hardships that each soldier faces upon returning home from the war.


 * Booby Trap: An insurgent drops a hand grenade with the pin pulled when he's shot. The soldiers barely managed to dive clear before it goes off.
 * Cold Sniper: The first shot of the ambush is fired by an insurgent armed with a sniper rifle. His target of choice? One of the plentiful American soldiers? Nope, the Iraqi soldier!
 * Fingore: Sergeant Vanessa Price, who gets part of her hand blown off when her truck is caught by a roadside bomb. She ends up having to get the whole hand amputated and replaced with a prosthetic hand.
 * Grenade Launcher: One of the soldiers in the squad has an M203 grenade launcher slung under his rifle. Doesn't do him much good in the end though.
 * Guns Do Not Work That Way: During the ambush scene, one soldier is shown returning fire on insurgents with an M136 rocket launcher, but is holding it backwards. Also, several M2HB heavy machine guns are seen mounted on humvees nearly flush with the roof of the vehicle in a way that's never done on real military humvees.
 * Handgun: Col. Marsh is armed with an M9 Beretta pistol as his sidearm. While officers do carry pistols, it would have made more sense for him to have had a rifle to defend himself when off-base.
 * Jerkass Woobie: Specialist Jamal Aiken. Falls and suffers a chronic back injury, is dumped by his girlfriend, and is later denied VA benefits after being discharged. Still pretty much treats everyone else like garbage, including a Vietnam veteran who tries to be sympathetic towards him.
 * The Medic: Lieutenant Colonel William "Will" Marsh, a doctor who was traveling with the convoy when it was hit.
 * Retirony: The troops were on the verge of rotating back home to the United States when they were sent out on one last humanitarian mission.
 * Shell-Shocked Veteran
 * Stranger in a Familiar Land: The bulk of the film covers the soldiers attempting to re-adjust to life in the civilian world after recently having had to fight for their lives. Some of them do not adjust very well.
 * Suicidal Overconfidence: One young soldier goes chasing blindly after an enemy after the rest of his squad mates have been killed or wounded. Predictably, he ends up running past the bad guy's hiding place and gets shot from behind.