From my USA Today column today:

We’ve all heard the stories, many true, some apocryphal, of soldiers returning home from Vietnam only to be disrespected and shunned by an ungrateful nation. How many were called war criminals or spat upon is as controversial as it is unknowable. But there’s one thing we know our troops never experienced. We never filled the movie theaters during wartime with films calling them war criminals, rapists and, figuratively, spitting on them or on their mission.
Not so today.
Hollywood has been churning out anti-war movies at a blistering pace of late, with more to come. We’ve already had Rendition, a tendentious, plodding assault on the war on terror, seemingly as-told-to by the ACLU, starring Reese Witherspoon, Peter Sarsgaard, Meryl Streep and Jake Gyllenhaal. There’s the meandering In the Valley of Elah, written and directed by Paul Haggis, about a family dealing with a cover-up of their soldier-son’s death in an unnecessary war. The Kingdom, more exciting than most, deals with an FBI team’s attempt to investigate a terrorist attack on Americans in Saudi Arabia. Its anti-war credentials come from suggesting that the sworn lawmen (and women) investigating the slaughter of families playing softball are no better than the murderers.