Stop-Loss

Not sure that we will catch this movie at the theaters. Here is an excerpt from Christianity Today's review of the movie:

In Stop-Loss, it is a reality that Army Sergeant Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) knows all too well. After two combat tours, one in Afghanistan and another on the killing streets of Baghdad, the decorated squad leader returns home to Texas. Haunted by the friends he's led to gory deaths and the civilians who have inadvertently fallen into his crosshairs, King, who is due to get out, wants nothing more than to retreat to the sanctuary of his parents' ranch and begin purging the bile of the past several years from his life.

But home is far from the respite that soldiers like King expect. No matter where in the world they go, they cannot get away from their own memories. Shattered by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), King and his fellow soldiers find adjusting to stateside life impossible. Likewise, their families no longer recognize the boys they sent off to war. The soldiers' wives and lovers can no longer relate to men who live teetering on the edge of profound brutality and who, like Lady MacBeth, cannot seem to wash the ever-present blood from their hands. Iraq, for all of its carnage, made sense; home is a land of foreign customs and alien peoples.

Everything comes to a head for King when, based on a contractual loophole, he is ordered back to the front lines. The controversial technicality, which prohibits servicemen and women from getting out of the military once their required term of service is complete if their loss is deemed too grave to America's war effort, is known euphemistically as the "Back Door Draft" or, more officially, "Stop Loss." It is estimated to have affected more than 100,000 men and women in uniform.

This story is way to familiar for my family. My son is scheduled to be released from his four and a half year service to our country a week from Monday. His release was originally scheduled for last October but was extended so that he could be deployed for another tour of Iraq. I hope that he will be released and not recalled.