Band of Brothers: Legacy Premieres
PHOTO CAPTION: World War II veteran Don Malarkey, whose service with Easy Company was portrayed in HBO’s “Band of Brothers,” poses with U.S. soldiers at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, in 2008. (U.S. Army photo by Maj. Carol McClelland/1st Theater Sustainment Command)
Twenty-five years after Band of Brothers first introduced television audiences to the men of Easy Company, a new documentary is looking back at the series — and the influence it had on a generation that would soon go to war.
Band of Brothers: Legacy premiered Wednesday, Sept. 9, exactly 25 years after the original HBO miniseries debuted on Sept. 9, 2001. The documentary features new interviews with cast members including Damian Lewis, Ron Livingston, Michael Cudlitz, David Schwimmer and retired Marine Capt. Dale Dye.
The timing of the original premiere became part of the show's unusual legacy. The first episodes aired just two days before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, as the United States was about to enter more than two decades of war.
For many of the troops who served during those years, Band of Brothers became more than another World War II series.
The new documentary is directed by Chase Millsap, a Marine veteran who later served as a Green Beret. Millsap told Task & Purpose that he watched the series while attending the U.S. Naval Academy, during military training and later while deployed to Iraq, where copies of the series were passed between outposts.
Millsap said the personalities and relationships portrayed in Easy Company remained recognizable to veterans even though their own wars looked very different from Normandy, Holland or Bastogne.
That connection between generations was occasionally literal.
In 2008, several of the actual Easy Company veterans traveled to the Middle East to meet American troops. At Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, World War II veteran Donald Malarkey posed with soldiers from the 4th Sustainment Brigade beside an M1151 gun truck. Soldiers there told Army public affairs they had grown up knowing the veterans through the HBO series before getting the chance to meet them in person.
The original 10-part miniseries was based on historian Stephen Ambrose's book about Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. It followed the paratroopers from their training at Camp Toccoa through D-Day, Operation Market Garden, Bastogne and the final months of the war in Europe.
The new documentary goes behind the making of that series while also returning attention to the real soldiers behind it. HBO says it includes previously unseen archival footage and photographs of Easy Company and World War II, along with reflections from the actors and filmmakers involved in the original production.
The National WWII Museum in New Orleans marked the anniversary Wednesday with an exclusive screening of Band of Brothers: Legacy. The event sold out.
A quarter-century after the premiere, Band of Brothers is now old enough that troops who first watched it as cadets, junior enlisted soldiers or young Marines have themselves retired from the military.
And for plenty of veterans, the question probably isn't whether they've seen it.
It's how many times they've watched it.
Sources: HBO/Warner Media, Task & Purpose, The National WWII Museum, U.S. Army/DVIDS.
(Source: OAF Nation)
