'homecoming' and the trauma of war

"But the town is real. Or as real as any ahistorical, prefabricated, American village. And the scene is a perfect synecdoche for the show’s message. In America, we’ve blurred the line between real and fake in order to facilitate a sense of liberation. From pain. From history. From our own moral failures. And the memory-erasing drug given to the soldiers is, in a sense, meant to make them more like their civilian counterparts, trapped as they are in a placeless void untethered from memory and obligation. Sure, the show could occasionally make its concerns more explicit. It does sometimes let the characters slip out of pocket and meander a bit from the symbolic roles they’re supposed to be playing. But hopefully that’s just praising with faint damnation, because the show is high quality and carries an important message: Moral obligation begins with memory. And as long as we still have boots on the ground in the Middle East and veterans back home, that’s a message that will remain relevant."

Here.