Rather reluctantly, I’ve been watching through the Band of Brothers series with Dave. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a series that ran on HBO a few years ago. Produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, it follows an airborne company that happened to be at a lot of key places in WWII (D-Day, Operation Market Garden, Battle of the Bulge). “Airborne” means they jump out of airplanes, NOT that they fly them or believe in the fizzy illness reducer, both of which popped into my mind. This was a real company, and they recreated what happened based on in-depth interviews with the men who really lived through it.
I’ve been watching it reluctantly because war bothers me. You’re saying, “Right, Sarah, you’re a compassionate human being.” But I don’t mean it like that. I was blessed with an active imagination. It doesn’t need pictures to have some knowledge of exactly how awful war is. I’ve never seen Schindler’s List, nor Saving Private Ryan, or any of those Vietnam movies that are on a lot of people’s “must see” lists. As a kid, I read a lot of “saving the Jews from the Nazis” books, until I got to the point where they were just too much for me, and I’ve never felt the need to re-expose myself through the movies (I feel the same way about movies having to do with racial violence, by the way).
But this series is important to Dave. It moves him, deeply, and he has wanted to share it with me. He got the set for graduation, and we’ve been watching it.
Wow. It’s well done, and it’s disturbing. I won’t go into details here–I’m not sure I could. What’s notable are the scenes I find disturbing. The violence is hard to watch. Watching men watch their friends die is even harder. Watching the people who lived in these places have to make impossible choices and have their lives decimated over and over again is even harder.
But what hits me most is the craziness of it all. The Allied D-Day strategy? Basically, to get our men in faster than the Germans could kill them. And D-Day itself? I’m not sure how it worked. It had to have been God, because men, after having parachuted in, were literally wandering around the countryside because they lost their unit and their map (and sometimes their rifle), and couldn’t find anyone else. No one knew where the roads were or what the country looked like or how many German troops were actually there. And it just kind-of went on like that, through the other ops we’ve watched. In the one we watched last night, they parachuted in outside of a Belgian town where they expected to find German soldiers. Instead, they found happy Belgians who threw a parade so the soldiers couldn’t get through town. They were supposed to find some bridges. No one knew how to get there. The Belgians had to show them the way. And it went on like that.
In the end, I’m left wondering when it’s ok to exact that sort of price from other people. When is it worth asking (or demanding) that people donate their time, their energy, and possibly their sanity and their lives, for a country or a people? It seems such a huge price to pay–the confusion, the chaos, the violence, the pain. And yet, war seems to be a necessary evil in our world, because the “bad people” aren’t afraid to hurt the “good.” But the more I see, the higher the line is that bad people have to cross to make me think this is worth it.
This brings me to a question: Is war somehow inherently masculine? There’s something in Dave that is drawn to the idea of fighting for the good with his body as well as his soul. It seems easier for him to think that the dangers just sometimes have to be faced, somehow, and that that facing is better than the alternative. I don’t know if that’s the military training and his deep resonance with aspects of that sort of life vs. my total ignorance of it all, or if it’s because he’s a man. I’m not saying that he wouldn’t be scared to run through trenches with people shooting at him, but he seems to accept that necessity easier than I do and look at it with some…almost longing, but that’s not quite right. Some desire to have the chance to fight against something that obviously wrong?
Insight, as always, is very welcome.
Sarah – my wife is the same way. She cannot, will not, expose herself to explicit war or tortue movies / scenes. They stay with her a long time.
And yes, I think war is inherently masculine, and I still haven’t found alot of reasons to justify it. Sticking up for someone else could *possibly* be an argument. Maybe. I don’t think sticking up for our own rights is a biblical reason for war, since we’re called to lay them down like Jesus did, and our lack of returned aggression will reflect the kingdom more than anything else.
Someone as a joke gave me a bumper sticker once, that asks the subversively profound question, “Who would Jesus bomb?”
Nobody.
I hate war. Yet I remember this strange feeling after 9-11 (I live right outside NYC and my spouse happened to forego his commute to the trade towers that day)… this strange feeling, anyway, of wanting to be a soldier. This was completely inexplicable, a base instinct kind of thing. I don’t know that this is confined to gender. Why, I can’t even watch a boxing match, but here I felt this terrible sense of wanting to fight.