The metal transfer cases came off the C-17 one by one on Saturday, each draped with an American flag, each carrying a soldier killed in a war that the White House markets to the public like the latest first-person shooter game.
President Donald Trump stood on the tarmac and saluted. Behind him, the wind blew across the runway. Geese called across the sky. Six families sat quietly and watched their children come home in a manner they never imagined.
Six Americans. Killed in Kuwait. A drone strike on a command center.
Earlier that same week, official White House social media accounts posted a video montage splicing real combat footage from Iran with scenes from “Call of Duty,” complete with on-screen kill scores and the pounding beat of rap music.
Another video featured SpongeBob SquarePants asking, “Wanna see me do it again?” between clips of explosions.
A third opened with Iron Man and cut to Tom Cruise in “Top Gun: Maverick,” Mel Gibson in “Braveheart,” Russell Crowe in “Gladiator,” and Keanu Reeves playing an assassin.
The caption read: “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY.”
The White House faced intense criticism for posting social media clips that blended real footage of American missile strikes in Iran with clips from video games, movies, and TV shows, “gamifying” the Middle East war.
Actor and filmmaker Ben Stiller issued a statement Friday demanding the White House remove a clip from his satirical war movie “Tropic Thunder.” Permission was never granted, he said, adding: “War is not a movie.”
But the distinction appears increasingly lost on an administration that markets military conflict the way Hollywood markets summer blockbusters and the way video game companies sell entertainment to teenagers.
The confusion is not harmless.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott reshared a video he believed showed a U.S. ship shooting down an Iranian plane, adding the triumphant caption “Bye bye.” The footage actually came from “War Thunder,” a World War II video game.
Abbott deleted the post, but not before it spread across the platform formerly known as Twitter, which has become, in the words of Wired magazine, a “verifiable mess” of misinformation since the strikes began.
The White House communications director responded to one of the military-game mashups with a gamer’s phrase: “Ws in the chat, boys!” — online slang for celebrating victories in multiplayer gaming.
This is how the United States now talks about war.
The war itself spreads faster than the administration’s explanations for it.
Trump launched what he called a “short excursion” against Iran on Feb. 28, acting on what White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described as the president’s “good feeling that the Iranian regime was going to strike United States assets.”
A good feeling.
Not an intelligence briefing. Not a congressional authorization. Not a coalition of allies — Canada, Spain, and Britain have all demurred, with London limiting its support to defensive bases when Iranian drones fell on Cyprus. Not even a clear rationale that senior officials can agree on, with cabinet members saying the U.S. seeks no regime change while the president insists he should help pick Iran’s next leader.
In the first week of strikes, more than 1,000 people have died, including Iran’s supreme leader and, according to Iran, more than 150 girls and staff at a school. Six Americans are dead. Three U.S. fighter jets were shot down by friendly fire; their crews survived. Iran has launched missiles and drones into 10 countries. Hezbollah, despite its losses in last year’s war with Israel, has fired rockets from Lebanon.
The war has expanded to include Gulf nations, NATO member Turkey, and EU member Cyprus. The Pentagon warns that U.S. munitions are running low. The National Intelligence Council reported in February that a large-scale assault is unlikely to oust Iran’s regime — a finding that suggests the “short excursion” could become something else entirely.
When ABC News asked the president what happens next, Trump replied: “Forget about ‘next.’”
When Time magazine asked whether Americans should worry about retaliation at home, Trump acknowledged the possibility with two words: “I guess.”
I guess.
Nearly 6 in 10 Americans disapprove of the U.S. military action in Iran, with most expressing doubt that Trump has a clear plan for handling the conflict.
Trump held a dinner meeting with approximately 20 executives from major oil and gas companies at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida on April 11, 2024. In exchange for $1 billion for his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump promised to immediately reverse dozens of environmental rules and policies, including limiting electric vehicle regulations and halting wind energy projects.
Trump has not only taken sweeping actions to reverse America’s environmental agenda and withdraw from international commitments. The U.S. has seized oil tankers carrying Venezuelan or Iranian oil and sparked international debate, with claims of Venezuelan oil assets.
While the Trump administration portrays U.S. actions as a way to reclaim what they see as stolen assets, critics view them as a move to take control of the world’s largest oil reserves.
The longer this war continues, the greater the incentive for Iran to apply asymmetric warfare against the U.S. homeland. This is not speculation. It is the history of the Islamic Republic, documented by the Council on Foreign Relations and every intelligence agency that has tracked Tehran since 1979.
Iran has murdered dissidents in Washington, plotted to assassinate a foreign ambassador in a Georgetown restaurant, and hired private detectives to stalk journalists in Brooklyn. It has offered bounties for authors. It has bombed Jewish community centers in South America. Its cyber operatives have probed U.S. infrastructure for years.
Law enforcement agencies disrupted Iranian attempts to assassinate former national security adviser John Bolton in Washington and to kidnap an Iranian American journalist, Masih Alinejad, in New York City.
The regime, as one expert put it, believes revenge is a dish best served cold — sometimes years later, when the moment maximizes damage and humiliation.
Sleeper agents, lone actors inspired and motivated by Iran, cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure, and physical attacks on critical infrastructure are all possible forms of asymmetric warfare.
The Austin shooting that killed three people and wounded 14 on Sunday is under FBI investigation as a potential act of terrorism.
The suspect wore an Iranian flag design and a sweatshirt reading “Property of Allah.” Whether connected to Tehran or simply inspired by events, the attack underscores how geopolitical violence can echo at home.
Yet the Department of Homeland Security, established after Sept. 11 specifically to coordinate defense against foreign terrorist threats, has spent recent months focused on immigration enforcement.
The Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE — has cut longtime civil servants with counterterrorism expertise. Just days before the strikes began, members of the FBI’s specialized Iran monitoring unit were reportedly fired for having worked on the 2022 investigation into Trump’s classified documents.
The National Terrorist Advisory System has not issued an alert since the conflict began. The last bulletin, warning of a “heightened threat environment,” was published on June 22, 2025, the day Trump struck Iran’s nuclear facilities, and has not been updated since.
Just days before Operation Epic Fury commenced, for example, members of the FBI’s specialized counterintelligence unit that monitored threats from Iran were fired by FBI Director Kash Patel for having worked on the 2022 investigation of Trump’s alleged possession of classified materials at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
There is a bitter historical echo here.
In March 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, officials held briefings with charts and maps. They spent months building a public case, however flawed, for war. Forty-nine countries joined the coalition. The administration spoke of liberating Iraqis and spreading democracy.
Twenty-three years later, that war’s toll stands at 4,500 Americans dead and more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians killed. The country remains fragile. The region remains unstable.
Then-Defense Secretary Colin Powell’s warning to President George W. Bush still resonates: “If you break it, you own it.”
The Trump administration says it owns nothing. Officials signal they are open to a quick deal with whatever government emerges — provided that government abandons nuclear ambitions and ends support for proxies.
But no one has explained how an air campaign produces a friendly new regime, or who fills the vacuum if the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps retains enough muscle to quell opposition, or what happens when the country’s ethnic factions splinter into civil war.
“The one certainty about war is its unpredictability,” wrote Linda Robinson, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who covered the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
She recalled attending a ceremony in 2003 to inaugurate the Iraq Governing Council, a tent full of expatriates next to the ancient Temple of Ur. Within a month, Saddam Hussein’s dismissed soldiers were in full insurgency. Within five months, the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad was rubble.
“It is hard to answer the question, ‘Tell me how this ends,’” she wrote. “A smooth passage to a free Iran is not the likeliest answer.”
On Saturday, after the Dover ceremony, Trump told reporters the visit had not changed his views.
“We’re winning the war by a lot,” he said. “We decimated their whole evil empire. It will continue, I’m sure, for a little while.”
He added that the war could end “where they cry uncle, or where they can’t fight any longer and there’s no one around to cry, uncle. That could happen too.”
This is the language of playgrounds and video games — not strategy, not diplomacy, not the sober calculus of when and why nations send their young to die.
More than a week after the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran, the war has shown no signs of abating.
The six soldiers who came home Saturday cannot cry uncle. They cannot respawn with a new controller and try again. They are gone: Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert M. Marzan, 54, of Sacramento; Maj. Jeffrey R. O’Brien, 45, of Indianola, Iowa; Sgt. Declan J. Coady, 20, of West Des Moines; Sgt. 1st Class Nicole M. Amor, 39, of White Bear Lake, Minnesota; Capt. Cody A. Khork, 35, of Winter Haven, Florida; and Sgt. 1st Class Noah L. Tietjens, 42, of Bellevue, Nebraska.
Their families sat in the wind on Saturday and watched the flags come off the plane. The president saluted. The cameras recorded.
Somewhere, on a social media platform, a video game clip of the moment is probably already in the works — real sacrifice spliced with fantasy, the line erased, the confusion complete.