Brickhaus

In 2006, my younger brother, U.S. Army Corporal Jeremy Shank, was killed during the second week of his deployment to Iraq.

The men in his squad had to finish the rest of that deployment without him.

I've thought about those men a great deal over the years. They shared experiences with my brother that I never could, and they went on living through the remainder of a war that he didn't come home from.

Nearly twenty years have passed.

In that time, I've watched my own friendships change. People who were once inseparable drift apart. Lives take different directions. Relationships that once seemed permanent become memories, sometimes without anyone doing anything particularly wrong.

And I've often wondered about the men who served alongside Jeremy.

Who did they become? Did they stay close? Do they still talk? What happens to a friendship forged under extraordinary circumstances when the people involved spend the next twenty years living very ordinary, very different lives?

What happens when the person who connected them is no longer there?

Those questions became the foundation of Brickhaus.

The film is fictional. It isn't intended to portray the actual men in Jeremy's squad or claim to know what their lives have been like. Instead, it imagines a group of former soldiers brought back together after decades apart, forced to confront the distance between who they were, who they've become, and who they believed their friends would always be.

Veteran suicide is central to the story, but so are friendship, aging, memory, masculinity, and the complicated ways people express affection and concern when they've never been particularly good at saying what they feel.

There's humor in it, too. A lot of it. Because I don't believe these men would spend an entire weekend solemnly discussing their feelings. I imagine they'd give each other absolute hell. They'd tell the same stories they've told a hundred times. They'd argue about things that stopped mattering years ago.

And somewhere underneath all of that, they'd be trying to figure out whether the brotherhood they remember still exists.

Brickhaus is ultimately about what we owe the people who once knew us better than anyone—and whether it's possible to find our way back to one another before another twenty years disappear.

Why this story matters

Military service creates relationships that can endure for decades, but shared history doesn't guarantee that people continue to understand one another.

Brickhaus is interested in what happens when those bonds are tested by age, loss, distance, and the emotional habits people carry into civilian life.

It's also about the difference between remembering someone fondly and recognizing what they were going through while they were alive.

The story approaches those questions through ensemble drama and dark humor, while treating suicide and its consequences seriously.