The Fights Change, but The Brotherly Bond Remains

It's one of those big, achievement-oriented families, a doctor's family, full of healthy kids who work hard and expect to do well and go into the world well-armored with love and confidence, motivated by concepts like "duty" and "proof of manhood." Maybe that's why four of the five brothers are Eagle Scouts.

Hmmm, they don't seem to make movies about those kinds of families much these days, perhaps on the Tolstoyan principle that all happy families are alike and unhappy families are all different, which perhaps explains why the unhappies appeal to storytellers.

If anyone was going to make a movie about the Rademachers, it could only be another Rademacher. And that's why Jake Rademacher was in Washington one day recently discussing the unusual thing he has begotten. His film, "Brothers at War" has finally debuted after a long and vibrant life at independent film festivals.

The movie is so interesting: A documentary, it seems to be about the war in Iraq, one of those rare, let's-get-the-good-news-out-about-the-troops enterprises. It goes places most guys with cameras don't: into a sniper hide, on a long-range border recon and finally into the center of that oh-so-common transaction known as a firefight. Jake took incoming, but luckily the incoming didn't take him.

It's also about the true culture of the military: a kind of frat-boy existence, except that few frat boys keep cocked and locked M4 carbines strapped to their bunks and few frat boys face the possibility of death on a day-to-day basis. But like frat boys, the off-duty uniform devolves to cutoffs, flip-flops, a jumbo-size tee, a baseball cap worn backward and a can of beer in the right hand.

All that is there, in spades. But finally the true subject of the film is not Army culture but Rademacher culture, especially the somewhat twisted relations between brothers, and how it drives them to do what they think is necessary but not necessarily sensible. Like combat.

So it's a war movie. It's a family movie. In some sense, it's a political movie. But to see how "Brothers at War" exists, one must begin with Jake, 33, with a spritz of red hair curling into vinelike tendrils and the enthusiasm of a rug merchant who could sell Bibles in Baghdad. He's got that go-getter, I-will-not-fail-or-quit-or-back-off thing going that so many of the world's winners seem to effortlessly boast.

Maybe it's in the genes. As one of five brothers and two sisters growing up prosperous and secure in Decatur, Ill., in what seems like an idealized American childhood, under the benevolent dictatorship of Dennis J. Rademacher, a family practitioner who clearly practiced family at home until he got it right and insisted that each of his kids try every possible thing, from sports to music, before making a choice, after which he backed them unconditionally.

"Our parents were pushing us to find out what we were good at. You got a couple of years to look around but then you've got to chose. And the only way to find out is to do it."

So that's how Jake grew up, wrestling with his smaller roommate, Isaac, getting good grades and all-around high marks; his dream, for a long time, was to be a soldier. When physical problems kept him from West Point, he set off to college (Notre Dame) for a degree in business, seemingly on the way to a square's life of success. But after a summer internship with a Chicago corporation, he recalls "feeling empty inside. I'd done well, everyone viewed it as a success, but it just wasn't for me, I was beginning to realize."

Jake deviated from that path his junior year, which he spent in Dublin. That's when he decided to succumb to the Irish disease of proud, lyric words boldly spoken. Poet? Politico? Publican? Well, close: actor.

"I knew: This is what I wanted to do."