Tag: / Military Culture

Open this season of the video game “Battlefield 6,” and you might find yourself dropping into a firefight as one of the Strix Raiders, the special operations team at the center of the shooter’s “Nightfall” update.

What most players sprinting across the map won’t know is that three of those characters are built from real Marines, and that the men behind the motion capture have spent the years since their service trying to keep other veterans alive.

Prime Hall, Don Tran and Rick Briere served together in the 1st Marine Raider Battalion. In the game, they appear as Rob Brooke, Douglas Pham and Atticus Moore. Out of it, they are business partners, nonprofit founders and, by their own account, brothers who have buried too many friends.

For Hall, the throughline from combat to civilian life is simple to name. “It takes a village,” he said. He frames it the way a Raider would. In a fight, you want 360-degree security. After service, he said, that security becomes “your perimeter of the relationships and the people that you have in your life.”

That perimeter matters because the landing is rough.

Hall enlisted in 2005 and was medically retired in 2017 after an insider attack years earlier left damage that finally surfaced.

Stacked with prescriptions, he said he began to feel like he was “in the passenger seat of life.” A holistic-healing retreat in late 2019 turned things around, and the lesson stuck. “You can only do so much on your own,” he said. “At a certain point, you know, you gotta tap into something bigger than yourself.”

The three built that something. Deep End Fitness, their underwater training program, started the year the trio got out and now coaches athletes and civilians nationwide.

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Hall ran a nonprofit, Marine Raider Challenge, until the unit relocated to North Carolina. Tran helped start another, Operation Resilience. The mission Hall keeps returning to, though, is grimmer. He has lost roughly 10 friends to suicide — part of a toll that still claims an average of about 17 veterans a day. The work, he said, is about turning each loss into a chance “to create a positive shift somehow in the community.”

His guiding phrase: “Be what’s missing.”

Tran describes the transition trap in operational terms. In the military, the stakes were high but the problem was simple. “Now it’s like, when you’re out [the problem] became extremely complex.”

Money, school, family and a young business all competed at once. What got them through was dropping the act they had all learned to wear.

“In the Raiders you’re this super tough guy,” Tran said. Out of uniform, that facade has a short shelf life. He and his teammates learned to say the thing operators rarely say: “I need some help, dude. Like, this is not working.”

That honesty, he added, is also what reaches the veterans they mentor. “That humanizes you.”

Briere, who admits he still questions whether he belongs in a mentor’s chair, landed on the same point. “It’s okay to drop the armor,” he said.

He describes a bond that no longer requires performance. “There’s no animosity, there’s only transparency.” Months can pass without the three talking, he said, and they pick back up like no time has passed.

None of them set out to be in a video game. The opportunity came through their Deep End Fitness work, and the developers’ focus on authenticity meant the men actually played the parts in motion-capture suits.

Briere, a lifelong gamer, still can’t quite believe it. Seeing the characters come to life, he said, “it’s surreal to me.”

Tran’s reaction was more practical. “My character doesn’t die,” he said.

The three are clear about what they hope the game does beyond entertain. Hall sees the characters as a doorway, “an access point for people to look into what we’re up to” and the work they have done since getting out, he says. For Tran, it is also a chance to put the Raider legacy alongside the units that already have their movies and books.

Asked what they would tell a struggling veteran, the answers came easily.

“Find your next North Star, dude, and navigate towards that,” Tran said. “You’ve done it before, probably in a way harder world.”

Hall offered a message of hope, the kind he says he is living proof of.

“If I can do it, anybody can do it,” he said. “Give yourself some grace.” Even a broken clock, he likes to remind himself, is right twice a day.

Veterans and service members in crisis can reach the Veterans Crisis Line by dialing 988 and pressing 1, or by texting 838255.

Joshua Close has played a lot of roles. He’s been in FX’s “Fargo,” “Killers of the Flower Moon” and Netflix’s “Wayward.” But nothing quite prepared him for playing Slinger, the combat veteran at the center of the film “American Solitaire,” which hits select theaters Friday.

Close drew on his own family to find the character. His cousin served multiple tours in Kandahar, Afghanistan, as a special forces member, and one conversation stuck with him.

“He said he had to go back on his third tour because he didn’t feel safe at home,” Close told Military Times. “He felt more comfortable being in situations like Kandahar because he knew who the people were around him. He knew how to behave.”

That kind of detail is exactly what writer-director Aaron Davidman was after. A first-time feature director, Davidman spent years traveling the country talking to people about guns, violence and the cost of military service before writing the script.

A conversation with a former Army captain who served in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than a decade became the seed of the story.

“He just impressed me with the real layered, nuanced, complex relationship to service, firearms, healing, reintegration,” Davidman said. “I decided to focus a story on a guy like that. What would it be like to follow a trained warrior and a reintegration through their eyes, through the experience of the veteran?”

The result is a film that resists the chest-pounding war movie template.

Slinger comes home from Afghanistan wounded and estranged from his young son, adrift in a country he trained to protect but no longer recognizes himself in. The film examines how, for some veterans, post-traumatic stress disorder and reintegration grief don’t manifest dramatically, but instead quietly erode a person from the inside.

Co-stars Joanne Kelly and Gilbert Owuor round out the film’s central trio, each character at a different point on the road back. Owuor said the dynamic mirrored something true about group identity and the loneliness that can live inside it.

“When you look closer and start to examine the different members in the group, you realize that even for them, that can start to break down depending on where you are in the journey,” he said. “And I think that’s a very scary place to find yourself.”

Kelly drew on her own family, as well, including a cousin who deployed four times to Afghanistan as a nurse. The preparation opened a conversation between them that had never happened before.

“I think it was one of the things I love about this job, the constant learning about humans, about different lives,” Kelly said.

Davidman has partnered with impact agency Picture Motion to build post-screening discussions into the release. It’s a deliberate response to the isolation the film depicts, and to a broader cultural moment the filmmakers believe demands a quieter kind of conversation than the one usually surrounding guns and military service.

“We’re not holding a screening, we’re convening,” he said.

For Davidman, the most revealing research didn’t come from one-on-one interviews but from watching veterans talk to each other.

“Watching these brothers and sisters share their stories, and they may not have even served at the same time or in the same branches, but there was a shorthand that was so informative,” he said.

That earned specificity shows on screen. “American Solitaire” doesn’t reduce its protagonist to a symbol. Slinger is a man trying to figure out who he is once the structure that defined him is gone, a challenge researchers and clinicians have long identified as among the hardest parts of coming home.

“I hope that people feel there is an accurate portrayal of veterans and of three-dimensional human beings going through real experiences,” Close said, “and that they can relate and feel less alone.”

“American Solitaire” opens in select theaters Friday and is coming to VOD at a future date. More information at americansolitairefilm.com.

“Wake up, daddy’s home,” Robert Downey Jr., playing the role of Iron Man, says at the beginning of a video posted to the White House’s X account Friday.

In the post, the clip kicks off a high-energy mashup of scenes from popular movies and TV shows cut together with real-world footage of U.S. military strikes against Iran.

The video was one of six posts Friday on the White House’s social media accounts that liberally pulled snippets from popular films, TV shows, sports events and music — running the gamut from AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” to SpongeBob SquarePants — and paired the clips with footage of Operation Epic Fury.

Among them: a scene featuring Master Chief, the iconic character from the long-running “Halo” video game series. In the short clip, Master Chief says he’s “finishing this fight.”

JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY. 🇺🇸🔥 pic.twitter.com/0502N6a3rL

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 6, 2026

But over the weekend, actors and others involved in some of the projects shown in the clips condemned the White House’s hype videos.

Steve Downes, the actor who voices Master Chief, in particular, was none too happy about it, and said he did not endorse the use of his voice or agree to be involved.

“I demand that the producers of this disgusting and juvenile war porn remove my voice immediately,” he posted on X on Sunday.

pic.twitter.com/JODHpTiAYo

— Steve Downes (@SteveDownes117) March 8, 2026

“Tropic Thunder” actor and director Ben Stiller also called for the video to be pulled down. A clip of Tom Cruise from the 2008 film appears in the post.

“Hey White House, please remove the Tropic Thunder clip. We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie,” Stiller wrote in a post on X on Friday.

Hey White House, please remove the Tropic Thunder clip. We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie. https://t.co/dMQqRxxVCa

— Ben Stiller (@BenStiller) March 6, 2026

The Trump administration has often ignored calls from artists to remove their content from its messaging.

After singer Kesha posted on social media last week condemning the use of her song “Blow” in a White House video, White House communications director Steven Cheung wrote in a post on X, “All these ‘singers’ keep falling for this. This just gives us more attention and more view counts to our videos because people want to see what they’re bitching about.”

Netflix released “War Machine” on Friday, a science fiction action film starring Alan Ritchson that raises an oddly believable military premise: What if the final phase of U.S. Army Ranger selection suddenly involved fighting a giant alien robot?

Directed by Patrick Hughes, “War Machine” follows a group of Ranger candidates grinding through the final stretch of selection when their training scenario collides with something far stranger than sleep deprivation and land navigation. The soldiers discover what appears to be a crashed aircraft deep in the woods. It turns out to be an alien vessel that transforms into a towering mechanical hunter and begins stalking them through the forest.

For veterans watching the film, the most unrealistic part may not be the extraterrestrial robot — it is the fact that nobody immediately assumes the alien is still part of the training scenario.

Anyone who has spent time in the military knows that after enough time in the field, every disaster begins to feel suspiciously like a test. Lost? Training. Hungry? Training. Cold, wet, exhausted and hallucinating? Definitely training. If a giant alien machine emerged from a crash site during Ranger selection, at least one candidate would absolutely ask, “Is this graded?”

Ritchson plays a soldier known only as “81,” which feels exactly like the kind of nickname that would replace an actual name during a miserable training cycle. The character is built like a tank and carries the quiet intensity that helped turn Ritchson into a breakout star in the series “Reacher.” Here, his opponent is not organized crime or a corrupt businessman-turned-warlord, but a massive extraterrestrial war machine with the personality of a bulldozer.

Critics have described the film as a blend of “Predator” and “Transformers,” which is a polite way of saying nobody is going to win an Oscar for this film, but the explosions and over-the-top special effects might. The movie moves quickly through its premise and settles into a simple survival formula. A group of soldiers is trapped in unfamiliar terrain, hunted by something unseen. Their only real plan is to stay alive long enough to figure out how to destroy it.

It is not complicated storytelling. It is also not pretending to be.

That honesty helps the movie. Instead of delivering long speeches about military ethics or global consequences, “War Machine” focuses on the basics. The soldiers run, hide, shoot and occasionally argue about what the machine actually is while trying to reach the next ridgeline.

In that sense, the movie occasionally feels less like a traditional war film and more like a live-action video game level. The team advances through a series of encounters while trying to discover the alien machine’s weak point. Eventually, that responsibility lands on Ritchson’s character, who begins experimenting with ways to damage the machine using whatever equipment the soldiers still have left, blank firing adapters included.

Is the movie perfect? No. Is it so cringe at points that you find yourself wanting more? Yes.

While “War Machine” treats the final field exercise like a chaotic survival event, real training environments are far more controlled and deliberate. Ranger selection, for example, is designed to push soldiers through exhaustion and uncertainty without actually turning the woods into a sci-fi battlefield.

The movie does not aim for that kind of realism. Instead, it asks a simpler question: What would happen if soldiers trained to survive brutal field exercises suddenly had to apply those same skills to an alien invasion?

The answer, according to “War Machine,” is that they would probably treat it like any other mission.

They would form a plan.

They would start shooting.

And someone in the formation would still wonder if the whole thing was being graded.

Hollywood has never lacked war stories. But it has often lacked veteran storytellers telling them.

For years, military narratives on screen have gravitated toward spectacle or trauma. Either elite raids and explosions, or the aftermath: PTSD, divorce, isolation. What gets squeezed out is the middle ground — bureaucracy, boredom and dark humor — where most service members actually live.

Three veterans now working in television say that changes when people who have worn the uniform are inside the writers’ room, shaping the story from page one.

Greg Cope White, a Marine veteran and longtime television writer, built a decades-long career after leaving active duty. His memoir, “The Pink Marine,” later became the basis for the Netflix coming-of-age series “Boots,” about a closeted gay teenager enlisting in the Marine Corps in the ’90s.

Veterans are often misunderstood in writers’ rooms, White told Military Times in a recent interview.

“One of the things veterans might fear about going into the writers’ room is that that’s all the experience people are going to want from them,” he said. “Just give me the military stuff and shut up.

“That’s not what I have found at all.”

For White, the value of veterans extends far beyond accuracy. “Our worldview is instantly expanded the day we enlisted,” he said. “We saw things, and we’re exposed to people and situations that a normal college-age student wouldn’t be exposed to.”

That exposure influences tone and informs how characters handle pressure. It shapes what feels authentic when a unit fractures or rallies on screen.

When working on “Boots,” authenticity mattered, but not as trivia. “You don’t want something like someone in their dress blues with scruff. That’s going to take a lot of people out right there,” White said.

For “Boots” story editor Megan Ferrell Burke, a Marine veteran who served from 2007 to 2011 and deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as a direct air support officer, authenticity debates often collide with visual storytelling.

Hollywood is a visual medium, noted Burke, who, after leaving the Corps, worked her way through assistant roles on “Army Wives,” served as a writers’ assistant on the World War II drama “Manhattan” and was staffed on “Outlander.” Sometimes what is correct is not what reads best on camera.

In “Boots,” for example, recruits were scripted to sit on their packs during a break, as they would in real life. On set, production placed them on logs.

“In any sort of universe, recruits would not be sitting on logs and talking,” Burke said. “But who cares? It’s so much better visually.”

For her, the issue is not perfection; it is intention. “I’m very okay with being inaccurate,” she said. “I just want to know when we’re being inaccurate, and I want to make that choice actively.”

Burke said she braced for backlash from veteran viewers over creative choices in “Boots,” including decisions about timeline accuracy. Instead, she found that many viewers accepted the show’s choices once they understood they were deliberate.

Over her 15 years in the industry, Burke said she has seen shifts in how military stories are framed. Early portrayals often defaulted to stoic archetypes. Later, she said, many projects focused almost exclusively on trauma.

“If you look out on the landscape and look for the stories of well-adjusted veterans, they’re a little bit harder to come by,” she said.

Burke does not dismiss PTSD narratives. “It is incredibly important to advocate for the very real experiences of service members dealing with trauma,” she said. But she believes the picture is incomplete.

“I feel like I’m the best version of myself because of the experience that I had,” she said.

Joshua Katz, a Navy veteran who served from 1999 to 2003 as a gunner’s mate and missile technician, entered the industry through multiple avenues, including stunt work, tactical consulting and writers’ room support. He worked as a showrunner’s assistant on the CBS sitcom “United States of Al” and later founded Katzmar Tactical Consulting with his spouse, also a Navy veteran.

Katz offered a more direct assessment of Hollywood’s priorities.

“They care about one thing, and that’s making a profit,” he said.

In his experience, veteran status may help secure a meeting, but it does not guarantee advancement. “It will never be because you’re a veteran,” he said. “It opens the door, but it doesn’t necessarily push you through it.”

Still, Katz credited certain showrunners with fostering supportive environments and taking veteran perspectives seriously when storylines demanded it.

He also pointed to story gaps he believes remain underexplored.

“You don’t see below decks,” he said of Navy life. “It’s almost always from an officer’s perspective.”

He would like to see more character-driven stories set in military environments without defaulting to combat or scandal. He also cited the VA hospital as a compelling setting where veterans from different eras intersect.

Across all three writers, humor emerged as a defining difference. Veterans understand that laughter often exists alongside stress, not in spite of it.

“It’s the only way I can tell my story,” White said of using comedy to frame his experience.

Humor, he argued, allows audiences unfamiliar with military life to enter the world without being overwhelmed. “There’s nothing more hilarious than that frailty of the human condition,” he said.

For those considering the leap from the uniform to the writers’ room, none of the three offered easy encouragement.

“It is not a career for the faint of heart,” Burke said. “The good times are great, and the bad times are really hard.”

White urged writers to focus on craft. “Write the story you want to tell,” he said, rather than chasing what seems marketable.

Katz emphasized persistence and preparation. “You’ve got to have the writing sample to go with it,” he said. “It’s never going to be just because you’re a veteran.”

When veterans become writers, war stories shift. The story moves toward lived ambiguity, and service is not reduced to a single narrative.

The difference is not cosmetic. It is tonal. And audiences, especially those who have served, can tell.

Long before cardboard boxes filled with frozen gel packs and prepackaged ingredients started appearing on suburban porches, the U.S. military had already solved the problem of feeding people who could not make it home for dinner.

The Meal, Ready-to-Eat, better known as the MRE, was designed for war. It had to survive heat, cold, impact and time. It had to deliver calories and consistency in places where kitchens did not exist. And it had to do all of that at scale.

Sound familiar?

Today’s meal-delivery industry, from subscription kits to fully prepared microwavable trays, operates on many of the same principles: Portion control, modular packaging and optimized logistics. Veterans who open a cardboard box filled with premeasured ingredients often recognize the parallels immediately.

The evolution of military rations shows just how deliberate that system became. From older field staples to modern retort pouches, MREs were engineered to balance durability and nutrition. A look back at MREs through the years illustrates how packaging and contents changed to meet operational demands. Meals had to withstand long storage and rough transport while still delivering predictable fuel.

That predictability is central.

Each MRE is structured around caloric requirements and mission profiles. A standard menu includes an entree, side, snack, dessert, beverage powder and accessory packet. Nothing is random. It is a calculated intake designed to support performance.

Modern meal-delivery companies market the same precision. Protein totals are highlighted. Calorie counts are featured prominently. Macro breakdowns are listed like briefing slides. For service members who once identified meals by menu number rather than flavor description, the emphasis on data feels familiar.

Behind the scenes, the logistics mirror each other even more closely. Feeding deployed troops requires a supply chain that can move millions of individually packaged meals across continents. As recently as last year, the Department of Defense refined packaging dimensions, pallet configurations and distribution systems to reduce waste and maximize efficiency. Those lessons now underpin commercial food distribution networks that ship insulated boxes nationwide on strict timelines.

Inside the development process, the parallels become even clearer. Military food scientists test taste, texture and shelf life inside controlled environments before a menu ever reaches a unit. A visit to the kitchen where MREs are created shows how rigorously meals are evaluated for stability and performance. The civilian meal kit industry uses similar controlled testing to ensure consistency across thousands of shipments.

Convenience may be the most obvious link. MREs were built for speed. Open. Heat if you can. Eat if you cannot. No dishes, no prep, no grocery run. The civilian market reframed that efficiency as lifestyle optimization: 10-minute dinners with minimal cleanup and reduced food waste.

There is also a psychological component. Field rations were never just about calories; they provided routine. In austere environments, opening a sealed meal at a predictable time created a small anchor in an otherwise unstable day. Modern marketing leans on the same promise: reliability, dinner handled and one less decision to make.

Of course, today’s meal kits are designed for aesthetics and convenience, not survival in a combat zone. No one is building a subscription box around instant coffee and wheat bread snacks.

Still, the blueprint is unmistakable. Long before venture capital discovered the efficiency of meal delivery, the military had already tested the model under far harsher conditions.

For veterans, the comparison is less surprising than ironic. What once arrived in a case bound for a forward operating base now shows up with a friendly logo and a discount code.

For decades, cigarettes were as common in uniform as a canteen and a helmet liner.

In World War II, tobacco was not treated as a vice; it was a comfort item. Cigarettes were packed into rations as morale boosters, something that could steady nerves between missions, the Imperial War Museums note. The image of a soldier lighting up in a muddy trench or on the deck of a ship became inseparable from the mythology of the American warfighter. The phrase “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em” became a broader cultural idiom, according to the Army Historical Foundation.

That normalization lasted for generations. Smoking was woven into daily military life. A cigarette break punctuated patrols and long nights on guard duty. The smoke pit became a place where rank blurred slightly, and information flowed freely. For young troops far from home, nicotine offered routine in environments defined by uncertainty.

But the same institution that once distributed cigarettes eventually had to reckon with the consequences.

As medical research sharpened the link between tobacco use and long-term health problems, the Department of Defense shifted its posture. Smoking inside military facilities was banned in 1994, and recruits arriving at basic training found tighter restrictions around tobacco use than their predecessors.

In 2016, the Pentagon moved to eliminate discounted tobacco sales in on-base exchanges, raising prices to match civilian markets in an effort to remove financial incentives.

Despite that shift, nicotine use has not disappeared; it has adapted. A recent report found that soldiers are significantly more likely to use modern nicotine pouches than civilians, underscoring how quickly habits evolve inside the ranks.

Today’s service members are less likely to be seen with a cigarette and more likely to carry a vape or a can of tobacco-free nicotine pouches, which have been linked to oral and dental health issues and cardiovascular disease risk. Marketed as cleaner, smokeless and discreet, these products fit easily into field environments and office settings alike. They also sidestep some of the social stigma attached to traditional smoking.

The military has responded by expanding resources for quitting tobacco. Tricare covers tobacco cessation counseling and prescription medications, while military treatment facilities offer nicotine replacement therapy such as patches and gum. The Defense Department also promotes health coaching programs as part of its broader force health protection strategy.

Still, anyone who has served knows the smoke pit has not vanished. It remains a gathering place, a bond that only those who don the uniform can truly understand. It is where junior enlisted troops vent about leadership, where NCOs gauge morale and where small frustrations surface before they grow larger. In many units, stepping outside for a smoke remains one of the few unofficial breaks in a tightly structured day.

That cultural role complicates enforcement. Leaders must balance individual autonomy with readiness standards. Smoking and nicotine use are tied to higher injury rates, slower recovery times and long-term healthcare costs, all of which affect deployability. At the same time, troops operate under sustained stress, long hours and frequent moves. For some, nicotine functions as a coping mechanism that is accessible and socially reinforced.

The military’s relationship with tobacco reflects a broader evolution. What began as a morale staple, packed alongside rations, has become a regulated health concern measured against mission impact. The products may look different in 2026 than they did in 1945, but the underlying tension remains.

LOS ANGELES — Robert Duvall, the Oscar-winning actor of matchless versatility and dedication whose classic roles included the intrepid consigliere of the first two “Godfather” movies and the over-the-hill country music singer in “Tender Mercies,” has died at age 95.

Duvall died “peacefully” at his home Sunday in Middleburg, Virginia, according to an announcement from his publicist and from a statement posted on his Facebook page by his wife, Luciana Duvall.

“To the world, he was an Academy Award-winning actor, a director, a storyteller. To me, he was simply everything,” Luciana Duvall wrote. “His passion for his craft was matched only by his deep love for characters, a great meal, and holding court. For each of his many roles, Bob gave everything to his characters and to the truth of the human spirit they represented.”

The bald, wiry Duvall didn’t have leading man looks, but few “character actors” enjoyed such a long, rewarding and unpredictable career, in leading and supporting roles, from an itinerant preacher to Josef Stalin. Beginning with his 1962 film debut as Boo Radley, the reclusive neighbor in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Duvall created a gallery of unforgettable portrayals. They earned him seven Academy Award nominations and the best actor prize for “Tender Mercies,” which came out in 1983. He also won four Golden Globes, including one for playing the philosophical cattle-drive boss in the 1989 miniseries “Lonesome Dove,” a role he often cited as his favorite.

In 2005, Duvall was awarded a National Medal of Arts.

He had been acting for some 20 years when “The Godfather,” released in 1972, established him as one of the most in-demand performers of Hollywood. He had made a previous film, “The Rain People,” with Francis Coppola, and the director chose him to play Tom Hagen in the mafia epic that featured Al Pacino and Marlon Brando among others. Duvall was a master of subtlety as an Irishman among Italians, rarely at the center of a scene, but often listening and advising in the background, an irreplaceable thread through the saga of the Corleone crime family.

“Stars and Italians alike depend on his efficiency, his tidying up around their grand gestures, his being the perfect shortstop on a team of personality sluggers,” wrote the critic David Thomson. “Was there ever a role better designed for its actor than that of Tom Hagen in both parts of ‘The Godfather?’”

In another Coppola film, “Apocalypse Now,” Duvall was wildly out front, the embodiment of deranged masculinity as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, who with equal vigor enjoyed surfing and bombing raids on the Viet Cong. Duvall required few takes for one of the most famous passages in movie history, barked out on the battlefield by a bare-chested, cavalry-hatted Kilgore: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn’t find one of ‘em, not one stinkin’ dink body.

“The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like — victory.”

Coppola once commented about Duvall: “Actors click into character at different times — the first week, third week. Bobby’s hot after one or two takes.”

Honored, but still hungry

He was Oscar-nominated as supporting actor for “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now,” but a dispute over money led him to turn down the third Godfather epic, a loss deeply felt by critics, fans and “Godfather” colleagues. Duvall would complain publicly about being offered less than his co-stars.

Fellow actors marveled at Duvall’s studious research and planning, and his coiled energy. Michael Caine, who co-starred with him in the 2003 “Secondhand Lions,” once told The Associated Press: “Before a big scene, Bobby just sits there, absolutely quiet; you know when not to talk to him.” Anyone who disturbed him would suffer the well-known Duvall temper, famously on display during the filming of the John Wayne Western “True Grit,” when Duvall seethed at director Henry Hathaway’s advice to “tense up” before a scene.

Duvall was awarded an Oscar in 1984 for his leading role as the troubled singer and songwriter Mac Sledge in “Tender Mercies,” a prize he accepted while clad in a cowboy tuxedo with Western tie. In 1998, he was nominated for best actor in “The Apostle,” a drama about a wayward Southern evangelist which he wrote, directed, starred in, produced and largely financed. With customary thoroughness, he visited dozens of country churches and spent 12 years writing the script and trying to get it made.

Among other notable roles: the outlaw gang leader who gets ambushed by John Wayne in “True Grit”; Jesse James in “The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid”; the pious and beleaguered Frank Burns in “M-A-S-H”; the TV hatchet man in “Network”; Dr. Watson in “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution”; and the sadistic father in “The Great Santini.”

“When I was doing ‘Colors’ in 1988 with Sean Penn, someone asked me how I do it all these years, keep it fresh. Well, if you don’t overwork, have some hobbies, you can do it and stay hungry even if you’re not really hungry,” Duvall told The Associated Press in 1990.

In his mid-80s, he received a supporting Oscar nomination as the title character of the 2014 release “The Judge,” in which he is accused of causing a death in a hit-and-run accident. More recent films included “Widows” and “12 Mighty Orphans.”

Ungifted in school, gifted on stage

Robert Selden Duvall grew up in the Navy towns of Annapolis and the San Diego area, where he was born in 1931. He spent time in other cities as his father, who rose to be an admiral, was assigned to various duties.

The boy’s experience helped in his adult profession as he learned the nuances of regional speech and observed the psyche of military men, which he would portray in several films.

Duvall reportedly used his Navy officer father as the basis for his portrayal of the explosive militarist in “The Great Santini,” based on the Pat Conroy novel. He commented in 2003: “My dad was a gentleman but a seether, a stern, blustery guy, and away a lot of the time.” Bobby took after his mother, an amateur actress, in playing a guitar and performing. He was a wrestler like his father and enjoyed besting kids older than himself.

He lacked the concentration for schoolwork and nearly flunked out of Principia College in Elsah, Illinois. His despairing parents decided he needed something to keep him in college so he wouldn’t be drafted for the Korean War. “They recommended acting as an expedient thing to get through,” he recalled. “I’m glad they did.” He flourished in drama classes.

“Way back when I was in college,” Duvall told the AP in 1990, “there was a wonderful man named Frank Parker, who had been a dancer in World War I. We did a full-length mime play and I played a Harlequin clown. I really liked that.

“Then, I played an older guy in ‘All My Sons,’ and at one point I had this emotional moment, where this emotion was pouring out. Parker said at that moment he didn’t think acting can be carried any further than that. And this guy was a very critical guy. So I thought, at that moment at least, this is what I wanted to do.”

After two years in the Army, he used the G.I. Bill to finance his studies at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, hanging out with such other young hopefuls as Robert Morse, Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman. After a one-night performance in “A View From the Bridge,” Duvall began getting offers for work in TV series, among them “The Naked City” and “The Defenders.”

Between his high-paying jobs in major productions, Duvall devoted himself to directing personal projects: a documentary about a prairie family, “We’re Not the Jet Set”; a film about gypsies, “Angelo, My Love”; and “Assassination Tango,” in which he also starred.

Duvall had been a tango dancer since seeing the musical “Tango Argentina” in the 1980s and visited in Argentina dozens of times to study the dance and the culture. The result was the 2003 release about a hit man with a passion for tango.

His co-star was Luciana Pedraza, 42 years his junior, whom he married in 2005. Duvall’s three previous marriages — to Barbara Benjamin, Gail Youngs and Sharon Brophy — ended in divorce.

Former Associated Press Hollywood correspondent Bob Thomas, who died in 2014, was the primary writer of this obituary

Jan Bender remembers the moment as if it were yesterday.

Taking cover from insurgents, his fireteam had just assembled in the dark in front of a house in Fallujah, Iraq, when the Marines were overwhelmed by the percussive blast of an explosion. About 40 yards in front of them was a mass of flames — the fiery remains of an Iraqi vehicle. Just behind them was the smoking barrel of the 120mm cannon from an M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tank.

In the wee hours of Nov. 8, 2004, the Iraq War became very real for Bender, who was embedded with India Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Division. With a camera in one hand and a 9mm M9 Beretta pistol in the other, the then-20-year-old combat correspondent was momentarily deafened and disoriented by the roar of the near-simultaneous explosions.

“I had never been on the business end of an Abrams before that close,” he recalled in an interview with Military Times. “We worked with tanks for weeks and weeks after that and came to be kind of numb to it. Just being a few feet behind the barrel is much different than being a few feet in front of it as far as the overpressure and blast go.”

20 years later, the Marine Corps can still learn from Fallujah

That’s the kind of gritty realism on display in the documentary “The Last 600 Meters: The Battles of Najaf and Fallujah,” airing on PBS on Monday, the day before Veterans Day and the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Marine Corps. The film by Michael Pack tells the story of these deadly engagements through the words and emotions of the U.S. troops who survived them.

The film gets its name from a comment made by Master Sgt. Karl R. Erickson, a U.S. Army Special Forces sniper who equates his mission with looking through his scope at a target: “Foreign policy? I don’t make it. I just deliver the last 600 meters of it.”

The rest of the documentary details what that means for the troops on the ground and in the air over these deadly battlefields, chronicling their courage, commitment and camaraderie through a bloody ordeal.

“We conducted the interviews three years after the battles when memories were fresh,” Pack said in an interview. “But it was hard time to get it on the air then. Everyone had their opinions about the war and it was clouded in politics. We strove to tell these stories without politics from the point of view of the people who were there. Maybe now is a good time to look back and remember what happened.”

What happened was some of the heaviest urban combat by the U.S. military since the 1968 Battle of Hue in Vietnam. Engaging scores of insurgent groups in an uprising similar to the Tet Offensive, U.S. forces fought from house-to-house, alley-to-alley and even face-to-face to retake the Iraqi cities of Fallujah and Najaf.

In the film, Jeff Stevenson, then a Marine major, refers to the deadly close-quarters combat as a “three-block war.” Marines and soldiers had to clear each area in succession so enemy fighters would not be able to get behind them.

During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military quickly defeated the armies of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. However, the fighting was not over. Insurgents flooded into the country to resist the U.S. takeover. In “The Last 600 Meters,” journalist Thomas E. Ricks described how surprised he was by the situation on the ground:

“Iraq was a much more troubled place than we realized. I remember thinking, ‘I thought this was bad. I hadn’t thought it was going to be this bad.’”

By 2004, insurgents had taken over the two cities. American troops were given the mission of recapturing them. In early August, Army and Marine units pushed into Najaf amid heavy combat. The fiercest fighting took place at the massive Wadi al-Salam cemetery, which features a series of underground tunnels and aboveground monuments — ideal hiding places for ambushes. American forces often resorted to close-quarter combat to clear the seven-square-mile graveyard.

The battle for Najaf ground on throughout the month with heavy losses on both sides. At the center of the city was the Imam Ali Shrine, where enemy fighters had taken refuge. While U.S. Air Force gunships and jets attacked the area around the holy site, Marines and soldiers participated in hand-to-hand fighting to close the gauntlet.

One of the Marines interviewed in the documentary, Lt. Seth Moulton, now a U.S. representative from Massachusetts, was leading a platoon of Marines in the basement of a building when the patrol next to him encountered insurgents. It happened so fast that the Marine on point only had time to react.

“It was so dark and the Marine was clearing this room,” Moulton said in an interview with Military Times. “This guy tried to tackle him and the Marine couldn’t get his gun on him. They got into a ground fight, so the Marine pulled out his bayonet and killed the guy.”

As commandos of the Iraqi security forces prepared to storm the shrine, a negotiated settlement brought an end to the fighting in Najaf. A few months later, U.S. forces moved into Fallujah. In April, a ceasefire was declared, though tensions remained high. On Nov. 7, the attack began anew with American troops pushing the insurgents south through the built-up city to more open terrain.

Bender accompanied India Company into what he called “a sea of violence.” Fallujah was the scene of intense house-to-house fighting against a well-armed and determined enemy.

“There were a number of firefights in open streets, engagements where the asphalt is popcorning around you,” he recalled. “You have absolutely no cover and you are running wide open, trying to return fire. It’s a humbling experience. If you don’t have a relationship with your maker before you get into a situation like that, you will during it.”

One of the most intense moments in “The Last 600 Meters” takes place at “Hell House” in Fallujah. Marines had entered the structure and were shot by insurgents from the second floor. Teams attempted to rescue the men, each in turn being pinned down by machine gun fire and grenades. Trapped, there seemed to be no way to get the wounded Marines out of the kill zone.

Finally, two Marines, 1st Lt. Jesse Grapes and Pfc. Justin Boswood, broke through a barred window of the house into another part of the room. They trained their rifles on the second floor and began blasting away.

“We start unloading on these guys upstairs and these two selfless Marines run across this kill zone — not once, not twice, but four times to pull Marines out,” Grapes said in the film. “We had some Marines who were in pretty bad shape.”

Though 11 seriously wounded were rescued and a dead Marine recovered, the two insurgents remained on the second floor. A satchel charge was used to destroy the building. As Marines inspected the rubble, they found half buried what they thought was a dead insurgent. He was still alive and threw a grenade. The team scrambled for cover, then finished off the resolute enemy fighter.

“In Fallujah, I can honestly say, wow, we certainly don’t agree with their political ideology or their religious ideology,” Grapes says on camera. “We respected the fact that they stood there and faced us and fought us.”

Fighting in Fallujah lasted until Dec. 23 in what became the bloodiest battle for U.S. forces since the Vietnam War. Though traumatic, their experiences served to link them emotionally with their brothers in arms in a way few civilians understand.

“Nothing bonds like shared suffering and sacrifice for a common cause or a higher purpose,” Bender said. “Fallujah was that for us, for those of us in the fight. Those bonds definitely endure.”

He added, “That fireteam, that squad, that battalion — they are my family from the Corps.”

“The Last 600 Meters: The Battles of Najaf and Fallujah” airs Nov. 10 on many PBS stations. It can also be viewed on the PBS app and will later be shown on Prime Video and other streaming services.