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The fearless American war correspondent Martha Gelhorn once said that of all the wars a reporter covers, you only 'love' one. Bosnia was my 'love'. The film is based on the true story of British TV journalist Michael Nicholson, who adopted a Bosnian child when covering the conflict there. The brilliant Stephen Dillane plays a reporter who questions news values when his stories about a besieged orphanage are overtaken by the Duke of York's divorce. All I did was bitch a lot and meditate on ways of barracking then UK Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd for facilitating the Bosnian genocide (Constant Reader: I grew up eventually). Nicholson/Dillane did something more constructive and adopted a young Bosnian girl with no future. It's pretty much spot on, filmed in the ruins of the real Sarajevo. Watch out for Emily Lloyd playing a thinly disguised version of Guardian correspondent Maggie O'Kane, the reporter, who along with Newsday's Roy Gutman, set the standards (moral and journalistic) for the coverage of that war. But I was still annoyed by the filmmakers' careless failure to cut the grass that grew thickly around the rubble in the five years between the actual war and the actual filming. It looked all wrong against how I remembered it. Silly but there it is.

For a different take on that war, try one of Emir Kustorica's memoirs, Zivot je cudo, or the excellent BBC TV film Warriors.

There's just not enough pure and shameless propaganda out there, so here's a perfect example. The attack on Pearl Harbor brought the US into the war and made national heroes out of the real-life Flying Tigers and their commander Claire Chennault, who as paid warriors in the Chinese air force were the only Americans already fighting the Japanese on 7 December 1941. John Wayne was swiftly hired to play the pilot mercenary leader in a propaganda movie a year later. I once tried to sum up the movie for the Daily Mirror's TV listings as a film "about a real man whose real name was Claire, played by a real man whose real name was Marion". The chief sub cut and replaced it with the words: "Standard John Wayne war movie" instead. Which is what it is, and none the worse for it.

If you want the opinion of someone who has worked nine conflicts, in its own way this might be the most truthful war film ever made, just as the book may be the most truthful war novel ever written. Don't laugh! "All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and when they catch you, they will kill you... but first they must catch you." That's war, really. You don't just fight, you escape death, and if you escape in the right direction, you get to be a hero and win the day. Naturalists mock the conceit of rabbit bucks forced to fight as one unit. (Rabbits work in male-female pairs.) But war is an unnatural world. No? Consider the book and film's concept of 'going tharn' – the fear that paralyses you in the face of death. Conquering that fear, leading the weaker through hell, it's what leadership in combat is all about. I read once that Watership Down's author Richard Adams, a veteran himself, based the character of the rabbit leader Hazel on his own platoon commander in Normandy in 1944. Someone else once told me it was on the 'additional reading' list of the British Army officer training school at Sandhurst. I can well believe it.