(2009) "Do you know what I suffered for you?" screams USMC Capt Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) at his wife Grace (Natalie Portman), as he swings a crowbar at the cupboards, bashing up the remodeled kitchen his brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) and three friends fixed up when everyone believed Sam was dead.

When she had earlier asked him what had happened to him in Afghanistan, he replied by questioning her about what had happened between her and Tommy. Already he'd asked Tommy if he'd slept with Grace: "I could forgive you." Confused and anxious at home, Sam's not the affectionate husband and fun-to-be-with father to his two little girls, Isabelle and Maggie, before he'd redeployed to Afghanistan in October 2007.

After the helicopter he and his Marines were in was shot down, only he and Pvt Joe Willis (Patrick Flueger) survive, becoming prisoners of the Taliban. While they are being held hostage and tortured for months - the head of their captors expecting them eventually to admit, whether of their own accord or by force, that they and the Americans are invaders and do not belong - Grace receives a visit from a captain and a chaplain, informing her of Sam's death. (This isn't realistic: according to military protocol, unless a marine or soldier can be positively identified as killed during hostilities, he's assumed to be missing in action, not deceased for at least a year, pending a review.)

Just before Sam departed for Afghanistan, Tommy was released from a prison sentence for bank robbery. Their father Hank (Sam Shepard), a Marine veteran of Vietnam (later confessing to Sam that his wartime experience left him damaged, resulting in his heavy drinking and taking out his anger on the boys and their mother), repeatedly berates Tommy for not being like his younger brother: "Sam had no quit in him."

Cassie Willis (Carey Mulligan) with her little boy comes over to see Grace and Sam, asking if he'd seen Joe died. For Isabelle's birthday, Tommy brings along his date Tina (Jenny Wade), who expresses the view that not even Marines can be "trained to watch someone die." Punishing himself, Sam snaps.

From screenwriter David Benioff's adaption of the Danish motion picture Brødre of a soldier's returning from the dead to find his wife's fallen in love with his brother, by Susanne Bier and Anders Thomas Jensen, director Jim Sheridan has Sam reiterate a quote attributed to Plato during the opening of Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down, though the original source remains unknown: "Only the dead have seen the end of war."

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