Fine post Oleeb,thank you.Private Ryan though so hard to watch is one of my favorite movies. I dread watching it but but do so anyway to remind me how unromantic war really is.Not your typical Hollywood war movie, nearly every major character looses their life in battle,which is more true to what really happens in war.It captures the stare, that far away look in the eyes typical to combat veterans who have had death fill their every sense. Their eyes have seen death,their nostrils filled with the smell of blood,smoke and death, their ears with the ringing of combat and the cries and groans of the wounded and dying. The stare is a looking away to another place called home and hope. The Captain said it sort of this way, "Fubar, yes this mission to save private Ryan may be fubar, but if it somehow earns some of us the right to go home to our wives and our gardens, the lives we had before we were thrown into this damn war,then it will be worth it and Im for it." Home and family, any politician who craves more than that needs to spend a few days on the front line filling his senses with death, then life might mean something to him. Money and power can not bring back a son or daughter, the husband or wife, the father or mother, untimely cut down by the blade of war.
In "The Unforgiven" Eastwoods character says to the greenhorn kid who is romanticizing about being a killer, "Kid, there's nothin good about killin, when you kill a man you take everything he has and all that he would ever have." We should throw away our childish romantic ideas about war and see it for what it really is,killing, and all that means.
In the movie Josie Whales when the tinhorn salesman offers to sell Chief George some some snakeoil cure all tonic, Chief George asks,"Whats in it? the salesman is taken aback and says,"well I dont know ,I dont make it I just sell it" Chief George replys, "Then you drink it!" Those who are barkers for war are the tinhorn snakeoil salesmen pushing it as a cure all tonic but they don't know what is really in the black tonic of war, they just sell it. Oleeb, like Chief George we should say to them, "Then You drink it." Thanks for the reminder of D Day Oleeb and those who died there.I was going to write a post about it but you have done it so well.I hope you dont mind if I hold on to your coat tail and ride along with these thoughts in reply

Yes there's nothing glorious, romantic, or hallowed about war and there never has been. Modern warfare is an even more dirty, vicious business because of the impersonal nature of the massive killing power we've developed. But the object has always been, if possible, to get the drop on your enemy in battle, ambush him, preferably in force when and where he doesn't expect it, at his most vulnerable point, and then murder as many of his men as you can. Break his line at a minimum, and at maximum break his will. You shoot them in the back as they flee from their positions, if and when they regroup you bomb them, shell them, bring any amount of ordinance down on their heads as you have available again to shred into pieces as many of their humans as you can before they reform a line to shoot back at you. If they are very disciplined and very proficient at warfare like the Wehrmacht, the Imperial Japanese and the Southern Confederate forces you burn their cities, you tear up the railroad tracks, you convince them they not only cannot succeed, but their people face utter annihilation if they do not unconditionally surrender.

The US military has mastered modern mechanized warfare so well, now abetted by technology that goes well beyond human senses, that enemies like the Taliban don't even bother fighting on our terms. It might have been different if Bush and Cheney let the military surround and annihilate them in 2001 instead of just pushing them back into Pakistan but we'll never know now.

There were men who were incredibly brave on D-Day. Private Ryan didn't get it right, the Rangers didn't "lead the way" at Omaha Beach, they landed in the third wave. The Rangers main objective, large cannons on a cliff overlooking the beach were moved inland days before the invasion. But from other units one by one, or in small groups US soldiers climbed the paths up the bluffs, getting blown to bits by landmines, or ambushed by hidden machine gunners so that others who followed knew where the enemy hid and what faced them.

But for most of them what was their choice as the big flat doors of their Higgens boats swung down? They couldn't remain in that kill box as the machine gunners who were supposed to be dismembered by air bombardment and naval cannon fire half an hour before shot directly down into, from a football field away their own little hell. They had to escape into the water, onto the beach, and behind the only cover they could find, the 3' high sea wall across that awful beach. As what was left of the men of the 29th Division, untested in combat til then, huddled behind that wall as mortars rained down on them, what were their options? Run back across that killing ground, the beach, into the water? Raise their hands in surrender? Jump the wall and run screaming in a futile banzai attack into fields of fire the Nazis spent years perfecting for that morning?

There wasn't any choice really. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They realized they were probably dead men, whether it was in the next second where they lay curled in the fetal position, in 5 minutes 5 yards ahead crawling over a dune in front of them, half an hour later as the last thing they saw climbing up the path were their limbs flying away, blown off from a landmine, or a German machine gunner shooting at them as they rounded that blind corner.

You can be the smartest human on the planet, the captain of the football team, the fastest athlete, the best trained soldier soldier who ever lived. None of that would save you in that situation. The odds of surviving no matter what you do are tiny.

So what do you do in that situation? You can die right there or you can move the war up that hill a bit. When the odds are that bad the best you can hope for is that your death will point out a mined path or a machine gun nest for the soldiers who come after you.

If you read the history books they cite some of the guys who did that kind of thing. Waldron's Torpedo 8 squadron who futilely tried to sink the Japanese aircraft carriers alone in their slow obsolete Devastators at Midway. The Soviet gunners who discovered Tiger tanks could be destroyed with a well placed shot from behind. The hedgerows of Normandy where time and time again the Nazis only exposed themselves when they could inflict the maximum number of casualties. The mountain gorges of Afghanistan where the locals have always used those tactics.

The memories of these dead last a generation or so in the increasingly dusty history books. Unless of course they're passed down from generation to generation in bitter remembrance like Quinn's disgust with the Campbell clan who helped slaughter his ancestors in their beds at behest of the English king centuries ago. I know the later helps nothing, I'm not sure venerating the former helps either.

Good post, Oleeb. I think it's right to question our perception of war. But I wonder if there is a concrete correlation between then and now.

I have spent much of the past two weeks in the emergency room or ICU of the county hospital (you know, the kind that treats the uninsured poor- overcrowded, messy, chaotic). While I could probably write a blistering diatribe on health care right now, I don’t have it in me. But Saving Private Ryan just happened to be on last night as my son was in surgery (which went well, thank God).

Though I couldn’t really watch it last night, it is an amazing movie. I often think of the scene where the Adam Goldberg character is killed with his own bayonet. Movies are a passion of mine, and I have seen thousands of gangster, crime and noir films, thrillers, historical epics, Peckinpah westerns, war and anti-war films, but that’s one of the most haunting death scenes I’ve ever seen. It is realistic, up close and personal. It bleeds the futility and fatalism, the existential frame of war, which is death. Death is its ways and means. Death is its end.

That said, I think Saving Private Ryan is still a romantic portrayal of war. Perhaps all art must be, in that it is a glorified representation of reality, but also there is something or someone missing from the picture here. While, Ryan’s and other bereaved families are shown at the beginning and end, the civilians caught in the war are not. Yes, there were hundreds of thousands of brave men fighting for what they believed in and there are brave men and women fighting today in the M.E. But the destruction, the death and pain and suffering, is heaped on civilians, the poor families that are trapped. They are not brave warriors. The man or woman who has lost a home or limb or child or family may “soldier on” but can’t hide the pain, can’t be made whole and can't "go home" again.

As I said, I’ve been sitting in waiting rooms, like so many do everyday; standing vigil, waiting for a positive turn, and watching others suffer right along with those they love. I’ve heard the instinctive wail over a loved one lost. In the hospital, everyone is almost naturally caring of others with forced but sincere smiles, pleasantries and kind words, concern and helpfulness, empathy; a community bonded by suffering.

But the suffering is pretty constant. Except that there are doctors and nurses with medicines and machines trying to save lives, the hospital at times seems a war zone in miniature (particularly, one of our oh-so-modern 21st century wars that take place in the middle of cities using remote controlled bombers or night-vision Apache helicopters that destroy with a short blast from a blinking eye). But the wounds and pain and death are real, and while a film may offer a profound facsimile, as does SPR, and may speak to the heart, it doesn’t approach the magnitude of death and destruction in any war. And it doesn't relate to the madness of misery among populations not between armies; the years and decades of suffering from war.

If anyone is interested.

On D-Day I jumped into Normandy with the 82nd Airborne. Below is my call to C-SPAN's Washington Journal commenting on some of my experiences.

http://c-span.org/Watch/Media/2009/06/06/WJE/A/19524/John+McManus+Author+The+Americans+at+DDay+The+Americans+at+Normandy.aspx

new10,

thanks for the kind comment.

By the way, I forgot to mention that if you go to that C-SPAN site, move the control button next to the on off switch to the 45.18 time mark, this is where I come on; John from Philadelphia.

Thank you for your comments Dondi!

Though the post is not on the recent list or anything any longer, I would like to ask your opinion on something John. Given your experience, what you experienced in the war, and in your long life, has this country been worthy of the sacrifices made by people like yourself and of all those who didn't make it home? Have we become a better nation in the intervening years? Have we done what we ought to have done since the nd of WWII to make the kind of world we wanted to see? I'd be most interested in any thoughts you'd care to offer.

Oleeb,

I should add that although the Vietnam war was divisive, apart from the demonstrators, both sides didn't make it personal the way it is today. Though the debate often got heated I don't remember the ad hominum attacks the way you see them today.