Admittedly, I’m late to the party watching the excellent war film, Dunkirk. Christopher Nolan used his signature story telling mark to bring the viewer to the shores of France in the early days of World War II, when the Allied army was cornered and on the brink of collapse.

Most of us have the blessing of never living through a war. Our sole experience is the stories we hear from veterans, or the pictures we see in newspapers. To say that war is hell is an understatement.

Throughout the film, several storylines happen in parallel, with each character’s experience intertwined with the others. We follow a lowly private as he struggles, multiple times, to get off the beach and onto a seaworthy vessel bound for the British coast. We see the officers as they struggle to get a cohesive plan together to evacuate 400,000 British and French troops off the beach where they’re exposed. The army must reach the safety of Britain, so they can regroup and confront the German war machine.

What’s most captivating about the film is how it eliminates the romance that we tend to get in modern movies about armed conflict. There was no love story, only the raw emotions of the warfighter. We see the infantry, navy, and air force, each in their element. No one military man is any better off than the other. We see the brutality of war and it’s purely destructive nature.

When war is far off, it’s easy to put it out of mind. As we approach Veterans Day next month, I hope that we will, with our whole hearts, applaud those brave men and women who raised their hands to defend the Constitution, no matter the personal sacrifice that oath may require, so that we might all live in liberty and peace.