When I think about the attacks on September 11, 2001, the memory I return to most often isn’t what happened that Tuesday. It’s what happened the Sunday before: I was a college student and had requisitioned the television in my apartment because HBO was premiering a new series, Band of Brothers. 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.
As a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps midshipman, headed into the Marines, I believed my entire future would be spent as part of a band of brothers. That night, as I settled onto the sofa, that iconic title sequence started: sepia-toned paratroopers falling across the sky en route to liberating Europe, the swelling strings of the nostalgic soundtrack. There wasn’t a hint of cynicism in the series. Or of equivocation about America’s role in the world.
As the United States’ sensibilities about war—and warriors—have changed over the past two decades, I have often thought of Band of Brothers. It’s a good barometer of where the country was before 9/11 and of the emotional distance we have traveled since. Today, the United States is different: It is skeptical of its role in the world, and more clear-eyed about the costs of war—despite having an all-volunteer military that insulates most citizens from those costs. Our appetite to export our ideals abroad is also diminished. Scandals from Abu Ghraib to Edward Snowden’s leaks and the fall of Kabul, Afghanistan, have left this country’s democratic evangelists in disarray. A United States in which Band of Brothers has near-universal appeal is a very distant memory.
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