Morning Wire
‘Brothers After War’: An Interview With Gary Sinise & Jake Rademacher | 3.1.25
Sat, 1 Mar 2025
A new film by Gary Sinese and Jake Rademacher takes an unflinching and personal look at the struggles and triumphs of US soldiers and veterans returning home from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.To see the film please use the following link: https://tickets.brothersafterwar.com/For free tickets for Veterans: https://brothersafterwar.com/free-tickets-vettix/
Chapter 1: What is 'Brothers After War' about?
Returning from war and reentering civilian life can be the hardest part of military service, particularly after wars mired in controversy like Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet that part of a soldier's story often goes untold. A new film produced by Gary Sinise and directed by Jake Rademacher takes an unflinching and personal look at the struggles and triumphs of U.S.
soldiers returning home from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
In this episode, we sit down with Sinise and Rademacher to discuss the making of their new film and how it folds into their larger mission of supporting and honoring America's bravest. I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Saturday, March 1st, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire.
Joining us now to discuss their new film, Brothers After War, is executive producer Gary Sinise and director Jake Rademacher. First of all, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having us. Yeah, thank you, John. Good to be with you.
You know, I wanted to say Georgia and I had a truly remarkable time at the premiere here in Nashville earlier this week, and we came away with a lot of questions we wanted to ask you. First, Jake, this is a sequel in effect for those who maybe haven't had the opportunity to see the film that preceded this one, Brothers at War.
You've been documenting this group of men, your brothers and more, for decades now. How did these documentaries come about?
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Chapter 2: How did Jake Rademacher start his journey with military documentaries?
You know, the first one came because my brothers, Joe and Isaac, told me that the truth was not coming home from Iraq. And this was 2004. They were with the 82nd Airborne. They were in combat. Joe was a sniper with the 82nd Airborne, 18 years old. Isaac was a captain, infantry officer doing civil relations. And as a family member, as a brother, that pissed me off. So I went back to my hometown.
I raised some money and I got myself over to Iraq. and I embedded in Isaac's unit, and he let me film everything. I got out to the Syrian border with his guys. Eventually the film follows him home. He predicts his daughter won't recognize him. She doesn't. That's all in the first film and the second. And then I went back to Iraq a second time.
My youngest brother's kind of a hard-ass Joe, to put it bluntly. Gary's probably laughing. But he gives me a hard time when he's 19 and then 15 years later in Brothers After War. But he said, you didn't see enough. You don't know enough. So I went back to Iraq. I went to the Sunni Triangle.
I embedded with the National Guard Infantry Company sniper team, the Iraqi Army, and Marine Advisors working with them. And I spent about six weeks over on that second trip. I I got into a decent amount of combat and saw the tougher, harder part of war. All of that became Brothers at War. I was asked to go to Iraq a third time to screen it for General Petraeus' public affairs folks.
While I was over there, a Marine colonel, a really lovely lady, said with tears in her eyes, you have to share this with Gary Sinise. Now, I, as a first-time filmmaker who grew up in Chicago in the beginning of my career and always looked up and admired, Gary said, do you have a cell phone number? Because we're not all drinking at the same cantina back there in L.A.
And she said no, but I shared this story with a friend of ours, Michael Broderick, and
and michael said i know gary and i think he'd love your film and one thing led to another and gary graciously created a couple hours on his schedule he was shooting csi new york and i went over to cbs two days before thanksgiving in 2007 and it was gary sinise myself and norman powell we watched brothers at war and i'll never forget it you know gary was very moved at the end of the film he just sat there like in silence for two or three minutes and i just let him sit in it
And then he said, it's a very important film, Jake. It's a very important film. And then Gary, as Gary does, he kind of started telling me what to do. So it was all good ideas. And, you know, it's like one of your heroes giving you advice, you're going to take it. And so eventually we said, let's make this official. And I asked him to be executive producer of the film.
That was in 2007, and he's been by our side ever since. The workshops that have come out of that have been sort of a collaboration. I'll come up with an idea, bring it to Gary for his thoughts, and next thing I know, I'm in front of 700 soldiers back from Iraq. And this new film also came out of that continuing collaboration, the conversations that we had.
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Chapter 3: How did Gary Sinise become involved with 'Brothers After War'?
It really struck me as you're seeing a complete three-dimensional person as you get to know each of the heroes that you highlight in this. These are real people that struggle with real things. The sense that we get two decades of insight into some of these guys. It really fleshes it out for you. It's very real. And I wanted to talk about that.
The workshops that you've done appear to have helped shape this film. There were questions and answers after the premiere this week that even got very, very emotional, pretty raw at times. And you could feel the workshop mode taking over in some ways. Jake, I know that you run these. How did that help?
How did working with a lot of soldiers coming home, becoming civilians, working through that process, how did it help shape this film?
Well, it's a great question, John. And one thing you said is three-dimensional. I was very, very passionate about presenting a three-dimensional look at these service members, soldiers, Marines, veterans, wherever they are on the spectrum of their career and life. These are my friends. These are my brothers. Oftentimes when you see documentaries, people cherry pick sad stories.
They're not really in the community. Somebody's kind of doing their drive-by film about it. And that's not Gary Sinise and I. He's been doing this for 40 years. I've been at this project for 21 years. I was at combat with these guys. So I really wanted to, and this is from the very beginning, I said, Gary, I can't just come and do an interview. I've got to actually spend a day with these people.
I've got to embed in their life now. I embedded with them in the foxholes. I got to embed with them, whether that means I got to jump out of an airplane with them or go scuba diving or, you know, get weapons training, which I did all, all of that.
Literally, yeah.
I go on a construction site with Ben. Like I want to show the audience, these are, you know, these are for the most part, highly functioning people, but they are still carrying some of the invisible wounds of war. They still have some work to do and I'll show their vulnerability, but I also want to show their strength and, And so I have to say that Gary also felt strongly about that.
And as I finished the film and then got through the process of recutting it, it was frankly some of his insistence. Some of the humor that's in the film, Gary was like, hey, did anything funny happen? I'm like, yeah, mostly at my expense.
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Chapter 4: What is the impact of the workshops on the film?
And he stops and he looks down and he starts to cry and he gets real. And he says, it's because that's your, it's an intimate connection you have with another man and it hurts. He was my soldier.
And that is the reality of the film that I have that, I was there first of all, but I know from doing our seminars that it's okay for me to ask that question and ask them to take a step further into the experience. And it's, he's gonna have to feel it a little bit to heal it. And so he opens up and starts talking about that.
So that's an invitation for anybody that's been in that hard moment of combat to re-examine that and watch somebody else walk through it two months after I was there. David reached out to me and he said, Jake, thank you for coming. It really helped.
And on Friday night, David is going to do a Q and a, and we've invited the second Marine division where he used to be the division gunner to come in and listen to him do a Q and a. So now if you take this all the way through the life cycle in 2005, six, I'm there with him in combat. He was the one who was in the crossfire. He's the reason we went out there now.
he hasn't totally walked through his own trauma we make the film which becomes an opportunity for him to really look at some of these moments he's sort of buried a little bit he heals from that and now he's using the film to model that for other marines and to help them understand hey guys When you're in a war zone, not necessarily the time to talk about your feelings.
However, when you come home, the more you talk about it, the more you make sense of it, the more you open up to your family or friends, the easier it's going to be for you to transition to the next part of your life.
You know, I wanted to stress that suicide does come up in this film. And Jake, you cited some statistics in the Q&A that are just utterly shocking. Anybody that's looked at it, it's actually hard to believe. But this is not a sob story for all of these, again, heroes.
There's a lot of victory, a lot of what we're actually witnessing in the film is all of them figuring out ways to deal with, to address these very traumatic things that they've gone through and make the transition and move on from them. And Gary, your foundation is driven by a lot of hope for our veterans, that it's not a tragedy we're dealing with.
These are a bunch of people that are the bravest, the most important members of society. They need some support, but they can and do amazing things when they come back. Can you speak to that some?
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Chapter 5: How does the film portray veterans' experiences?
brothers after war is part of our wellness program at the gary sinise foundation like jake said he'll be doing workshops with both movies he'll be doing workshops for active duty and he'll be doing workshops with brothers after war for veterans and we've had to expand that i said to him at one point jake you know what you want to expand this program but you can't do it all by yourself so we have to have additional counselors and additional trainers
people that can really train folks in giving them the tools that we're trying to give them to move on with their lives. It's all about moving on in a positive way. I've had this conversation with Jake many times. When I played Lieutenant Dan Taylor in Forrest Gump, the good thing about that story is that it's a happy ending at the end, right? You've got a guy who goes off to war.
He's serving during a time of... conflict in our own country about whether he should have even been in the war or not. He has to isolate. He drowns himself in alcohol and disappears. But then, thankfully, at the end of that story, he's standing up again. He's making peace and he's moving on.
And that's the story that we want for every single person who goes and serves in the military and comes home from war and defends our country. We want them to be OK. We want them to move on. A lot of them. are struggling. So we try to provide as many wellness programs at the Gary Sinise Foundation as possible to support them.
And if we don't have those programs, we try to point them in the right direction. Jake and his films are a part of our relief and resiliency efforts at the Gary Sinise Foundation to make sure that if you go off to war, you go to serve your country, that there is a grateful nation out there and that we appreciate what you've been doing for us and that we're going to back you up.
It's beautiful and wonderful. And it speaks to the success of your workshops, that you need more people doing more of them because clearly they're making a difference. A final question for both of you. What's next with this project? Where can people see it? How do you plan to use this going forward with your various efforts?
Yeah, well, you can go to garycinesefoundation.org. Or you can go to brothersafterwar.com. There you will find links to find theaters near you that the movie will be playing this weekend. You can actually go on to a link. Put your town or your zip code in there, and it'll tell you what Regal theaters it's playing in.
And by the way, Regal has been just outstanding with us on this one, really supportive of Jake and the movie. They've got it in how many theaters this weekend, Jake, now?
Yeah, it's sort of astounding. We're playing in 138 movie theaters across the country, and 100 of those movie theaters are Regal cinemas.
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