Miles Teller wears an unidentified watch

Jason Hall wrote American Sniper and then directed this. Thank You for Your Service was his first time behind the camera, adapting David Finkel's nonfiction book about soldiers returning from Iraq. Miles Teller plays Staff Sergeant Adam Schumann, based on a real person. Haley Bennett is his wife. Joe Cole and Beulah Koale play squad mates dealing with their own versions of the same damage. Amy Schumer, in a straight dramatic role, plays the wife of a soldier who did not come home. 109 minutes.

Schumann wears a Casio G-Shock from the 6900 series, the round-face model that has been military standard issue since the 1990s. Shock resistant, 200-meter water resistance, negative LCD display readable in desert sun. Under a hundred dollars. The DW-6900 is the watch soldiers actually wear because it works and they can afford to replace it when it breaks. This is not a prop department making a stylistic choice. This is a prop department making a documentary one.

The watch is the same at home as it was in Iraq. That is the thing about coming back that the film understands. Schumann returns and the house is the same, the kids are the same, the kitchen is the same, but everything feels wrong. The G-Shock keeps tracking hours that feel nothing like the hours it tracked on patrol. How long since he slept. How many minutes he can hold it together. The 6900 does not know the difference between Topeka and Baghdad. It just counts.