Watching the basketball playoffs, I’ve been struck by this Budweiser commercial, called “Coming Home,” which is in heavy rotation:

What is Budweiser advertising here? Beer, obviously, but what part of the beer experience—and what part of the war experience does it draw on? Even though the ad ends with a party, the mood is not celebration but relief at the end of a long day of work, when you are very tired. (Both of the main characters are asleep at some point in the ad.) It is notable that the welcomer is a older brother or friend—avoiding the device of the little boy who looks at the soldier and wants to be him—rather than a parent. (There’s a middle-aged couple at the party, but we see the brother calling them at another house, and the woman’s greeting is more that of an aunt’s.) This soldier is a kid—he could pass for a high school sophomore—and somewhat unmoored; going to war has not changed either of those things. He looks on the verge of tears until the very end, when everybody else is hugging him. In one shot, he dries his hands at the sink in what looks like a grim bus-terminal bathroom, and then wipes his eyes, as if he’s been crying where no one could see him. He is not the conquering hero, nor was meant to be. What he is meant to be is at home.

That is not to say that this is an anti-war ad, by any means. And my own sense that our enterprises in Afghanistan and Iraq have taken an awful toll on too many young people undoubtedly affects how I see it—I’d be glad to hear other opinions. But Budweiser is not stupid; there has been a shift in public opinion about the war, and there is a notable distance between “Coming Home” and, say, “Tribute,” the ad Budweiser ran during the 2005 Super Bowl. In that one, the passengers waiting in an air terminal break into applause as a detachment of soldiers passes through. The troops smile, modest and delighted. Whether they are going back to battle or coming home seems irrelevant: there is victory in both directions, and the purpose of beer is to make a toast.

There is a better variation on the soldier-in-an-airport theme, in an American Airlines commercial from 2009, that crosses the idea of “Tribute” with the sense of melancholy relief in “Coming Home.” Maybe melancholy isn’t the right word; I might just mean that it makes me cry:

This time, there isn’t a group of soldiers, but one—a young black woman who looks tired and, if not sad, at least lonely. The emotional twist comes from an old white man she sees looking at her as she makes her way to the gate—she’s been told that military personnel are being pre-boarded. From her expression, she seems to wonder if he resents her getting ahead in line; and then he salutes her. In that instant, there is all the promise of the military not only as a fighting force but as a transformative and democratic institution: a leveler and an engine of aspiration. As in the Budweiser ad, the war hasn’t magically turned her into the person she might dream of being; but being saluted reminds her, one feels, that she doesn’t have to be who she was. Then again, it’s not clear that this soldier is going home, or back to war.

Any suggestions for more examples of ads that feature soldiers—not recruiting ads, or deliberately world-historical ones like Chevrolet’s “This Is Our Country” or Will.i.am’s for Pepsi, but story-telling ones? This is not our first war in the age of modern advertising, of course; none of these ads could have taught Nelson C. Metcalf, Jr., the ad man who put together “The Kid in Upper 4,” for the New Haven Railroad, in late 1942, trying to make people feel good about sacrificing for soldiers, anything he didn’t already know. In that one, the soldier is also very young, and he’s told it’s all right to cry—the troop train is dark, and no one will see:

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