***SPOILERS*** Highly inflammatory made for TV movie showing how the present war in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan effects us all here at home as well as on the battlefield of those two war torn and embattled country's.
The film "Stir of Echoes: The Homecoming" starts out like your typical war film with an attack on a van that runs a road block in Iraq. The person in charge of the US patrol Capt. Ted Cogan, Rob Lowe, orders a warning shot but his order doesn't go through to the tank commander. This results is a full scale one sided fire fight where everyone in the van gets roasted alive when it's hit in the gas tank by a volley of rifle shots. The results of the attack on the van led to a real Iraqi insurgents attack on the US Army unite with both Capt. Cogan and one of his men the units medic Kabinsky, Nicholas Carella, badly wounded in the shootout; It later turns that Capt. Cogan survived but Kabinsky didn't.
Recovering back home the now discharged from the US military Ted Cogan finds out that his actions resulted in some half dozen innocent Iraqi civilians being killed including a 12 year-old girl that he and Kabinsky desperately tried to save. It's then when Cogan starts to get these intense headaches and hallucinations where he relives the horrors that he went through in Iraq.
Back home Cogan finds that everything that he left behind isn't what it used to be with his son Max,Ben Lewis, becoming very resentful and even hateful of all persons of Arabic decent as well as taking up smoking and drinking. Later going to see his neighbor April, Katya Gardner, Cogan is shocked to both find her husband was not only killed in Iraq but savagely decapitated! Cogan finds April is so distraught over her husbands brutal death that he had to take a .45 handgun from her to keep April from blowing her brains out.
Th film wastes a lot of time in Ted Cogan going through a number of strange and almost unnecessary mental breakdowns and mind-bending hallucinations but when it gets to the real reason for what's unknowingly on his mind it more then makes up for that defect. We and Ted are drawn to this place some two hours drive from his home and it's there that he finds out what's really driving him insane and it has nothing to do with what he did in Iarq! Ted's deteriorating mental condition does in fact have everything to do with what people here in the states see on TV and read in the newspapers about that war and how they in their own way try to fight it here back home!
Very unusual war movie that's made at a time that the war that it depicts is still going on. Ted who by being in the war and suffering from it's affects is by far more understanding then those who aren't about the people, basically Iraqis, who are said to be his and Americas mortal enemies. The ending is almost too hard to watch in that it turns people here at home who are effected by the war in Iraq into the monsters, like Al-Quida and the Taliban, that we depict our enemies as being.
Besides the aforementioned cast there's also Mannie McPhail as Molly Cogan who ends up not only losing her husband Ted who ends up in a mental institution from the criminally insane but her son Max, in how what happened to his father affected him, as well as her life! All this because of a war being fought some 7,000 miles away on the other side of the globe that, with what we now know, should't have been fought at all!
The film "Stir of Echoes: The Homecoming" starts out like your typical war film with an attack on a van that runs a road block in Iraq. The person in charge of the US patrol Capt. Ted Cogan, Rob Lowe, orders a warning shot but his order doesn't go through to the tank commander. This results is a full scale one sided fire fight where everyone in the van gets roasted alive when it's hit in the gas tank by a volley of rifle shots. The results of the attack on the van led to a real Iraqi insurgents attack on the US Army unite with both Capt. Cogan and one of his men the units medic Kabinsky, Nicholas Carella, badly wounded in the shootout; It later turns that Capt. Cogan survived but Kabinsky didn't.
Recovering back home the now discharged from the US military Ted Cogan finds out that his actions resulted in some half dozen innocent Iraqi civilians being killed including a 12 year-old girl that he and Kabinsky desperately tried to save. It's then when Cogan starts to get these intense headaches and hallucinations where he relives the horrors that he went through in Iraq.
Back home Cogan finds that everything that he left behind isn't what it used to be with his son Max,Ben Lewis, becoming very resentful and even hateful of all persons of Arabic decent as well as taking up smoking and drinking. Later going to see his neighbor April, Katya Gardner, Cogan is shocked to both find her husband was not only killed in Iraq but savagely decapitated! Cogan finds April is so distraught over her husbands brutal death that he had to take a .45 handgun from her to keep April from blowing her brains out.
Th film wastes a lot of time in Ted Cogan going through a number of strange and almost unnecessary mental breakdowns and mind-bending hallucinations but when it gets to the real reason for what's unknowingly on his mind it more then makes up for that defect. We and Ted are drawn to this place some two hours drive from his home and it's there that he finds out what's really driving him insane and it has nothing to do with what he did in Iarq! Ted's deteriorating mental condition does in fact have everything to do with what people here in the states see on TV and read in the newspapers about that war and how they in their own way try to fight it here back home!
Very unusual war movie that's made at a time that the war that it depicts is still going on. Ted who by being in the war and suffering from it's affects is by far more understanding then those who aren't about the people, basically Iraqis, who are said to be his and Americas mortal enemies. The ending is almost too hard to watch in that it turns people here at home who are effected by the war in Iraq into the monsters, like Al-Quida and the Taliban, that we depict our enemies as being.
Besides the aforementioned cast there's also Mannie McPhail as Molly Cogan who ends up not only losing her husband Ted who ends up in a mental institution from the criminally insane but her son Max, in how what happened to his father affected him, as well as her life! All this because of a war being fought some 7,000 miles away on the other side of the globe that, with what we now know, should't have been fought at all!