I'm generally not a watcher of war movies, but HBO's "Band of Brothers" is a compelling series. It focuses on an actual company of Army paratroopers during World War II, the war of most of our parents' generation.
Each episode opens with interviews with actual survivors, then the rest is powerfully enacted by young actors. It's the relationship among the "brothers" that matters in this series--as boys on both sides are just that: boys, following orders, often to their death.
During a cease fire, you can hear the German soldiers singing "Silent Night." In close ups of American soldiers, you feel their agony between battles. As in all war, the players are real people with real families, playing out what one soldier calls "a game" dictated by the higher ups. Once in, war is their world, and they cannot afford the luxury of thinking and feeling what they felt in their former worlds.
In any hands-on and high-risk endeavor, a brotherhood of trust comes from risking their lives (or being willing to) for the sake of other people, often for the sake of injured comrades. These men have only each other as they trudge through snow to kill other men, not unlike themselves except for national ideologies and language.
"You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will," wrote William Sherman--who made famous the phrase repeated in every war since: "War is hell."
"War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace."
Whether or not war is the path to peace is too big a question for me to address, but what I do know--as a mother of a son, as a grandmother to three boys, is that war is a senseless waste of human beings. On the news we hear numbers of "troops" killed (in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Iraq). But we rarely see their faces or hear their names. These are real human beings loved by their parents, wives, children, and spouses. We should see their faces and know their names. Maybe then, we'd find ways to do more to end wars, and not to assume that we--as a country--should spend even more of our national resources to prepare for them.
If the conversations from the top were not peppered with fear and words like "winning" and "defeat," maybe we'd be able to imagine a world in which war was not regarded as the inevitable path to solving every problem between countries.
As one of the veterans of these battles said, "We were all just doing our jobs--the Germans and us. We were just kids really. Under different situations, we might have been good friends."
