[PEN-L:386] Re: Re: Saving Private Ryan

["Eric Nilsson" <enilsson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

My father is quite willing to talk of his own experiences
in WWII.

This is so because, as with others, he was not directly involved in
combat. It also is because, in recent years, Alzheimer's is
slowly erasing his memories of many periods of his life and is
heightening his memories of other, more intense, periods of his life.

My dad's primary goal in WWII was to avoid combat. And, due to
amazing luck, he was plucked out of an infantry unit
destined to be cannon fodder later on in the war. Otherwise the
odds were he would have been killed.

Because of his newspaper reporter background he
was transferred to a job writing news releases detailing
"the successes" of the 100th bomb group in England. Although he
never fired a weapon in anger, he experienced indirectly,
and intensely, combat. His job was to interview
bomber crews after they returned from missions and
to sit in on debriefing sessions with these crews. He
got to hear first hand the horrors of these men's lives
hours after they lived it. One day he would interview
a 21 -year-old pilot; the next day this man would have
been killed by flak over France. He would have a
beer in the evening with a tail gunner; the next day he
would see the man's plane crash on takeoff and
all in the plane be killed.

His press releases, however, would present the "heroic soldiers
doing their duties bravely." He know the truth of the horrors but the
army, understandably, wanted something more positive to appear
in the newspapers in the states.

Four themes of his "war stories" are:
1) how he was the luckiest man in the world because
of his transfer out of his infantry unit;
2) the fliers in his bomb group despised those
who liked flying missions;
3) these fliers despised most of all those whose "heroics"
risked the lives of other men; and
4) wartime London was a great place to spend a
weekend if you were an American with money in your
pocket (if you ignored the buzz bombs).

The only war movie he thinks is "realistic" is Catch 22,
based on the Heller novel. To him "realism" is not created by having
actors wear the correct uniforms and using the correct slang,
but something that suggests the stupidity and horror of it all.

Watching my dad fade away because of Alzheimer's is
very hard to do. He's a wonderful man.

An aside. I think the discussion of the "realism" of movies,
such as Saving PR, in the mass media is shaped by the
conservative agenda to reinterpret "history" as
"getting the facts right."

Eric
..

Eric Nilsson
Economics Department
CSUSB
San Bernardino, CA 92407
enilsson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
909-880-5564