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Two recent films about soldiers in the second World War, Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line, raise issues rarely addressed in the anti-war community. These are films about the experience of war, one the story of a mission, the other the story of the men trapped in one. Saving Private Ryan is a far more sanitized version of “grunting,” shown as the emerging flashback of a veteran visiting soldiers’ graves in Europe. We are given a mission, and a group of characters whose personalities are retained through the thick and thin of battle, and even a moral at the end. Cowardice is shown to us only in the cowering response of a single junior officer sent on his first combat mission. The gore and pain of the opening battle scene, a landing, and later events concerning treatment of prisoners and the politics of military decision-making, have led some to say it is an anti-war film.

And for those who have never seen anything but a completely sanitized version of war in films, it has had that effect. There is a reason cameras are now forbidden on the front lines of battle. However the film ends with a return to the veteran, remembering those who saved him, and gives a sense of purpose and dignity to the war and to his life. This is one of the great seductions of war. “Unit morale” is also unit morality, and the broader realities of war and genocide are reduced to stories of small groups of men and how they act, ignoring the fact that they are somewhere far from home, doing something they may later wonder why they did or how to live with.

The return to World War II is also a return to a time when America still had it’s sense of purpose for war. Our disillusionment came with the Vietnam war, when we finally realized there was such a thing as a “bad” war and that America could lose one. The Pentagon is still trying desperately to overcome the “Vietnam Syndrome” and to restore war to its former glory. The nature of modern war, the freedom of communication, the interconnected globe, and the consciousness and treatment of the troops may make that forever impossible. But the character of individual wars, the nature of the military and its role, and the discontent of those asked to fight in it are too often ignored by those who truly oppose all war on moral grounds. Unfortunately, the debate raging for the last three decades about war and militarism has instead been limited to a gridlock shouting match between Mahatma Gandhi and John Wayne.

Those who approve or disapprove of war are almost equidistant from those who have experienced it. The experience of war, like that of real love, is often intense, transformative and unforgettable. For many young men, and an increasing number of women, military training and combat will be their most memorable and exciting experiences, their most painful and traumatizing, and the hardest to integrate if they survive, wounded or not. In an alienated society, the camaraderie of the military units, the special trust developed in training and crisis, and the sense of personal development and pride in meeting the challenges of the ultimate human confrontation will not easily be replaced in the civilian life that follows for most of them. Nor will the conflicts of conscience and doubt that plague the survivors of such grim scenarios. Far too many realize they are conscientious objectors to war only after the battle, and some never recover. Three times as many Vietnam veterans killed themselves as died in combat. And in the case of victims of Agent Orange and the Gulf War “syndromes”, some died in battle but don’t know it yet. So, war becomes both the worst and the best event in their lives. And, as yet, neither the peace movement nor the society has found it’s moral equivalent (though we have certainly tried).

The Thin Red Line, based on a work by novelist John James, comes closer to the reality of war because it looks from so many different perspectives. Like Private Ryan, the film opens with the decisions of officers, far removed from the field of battle. At one point, a line officer asks a commander whose orders are threatening the careless loss of lives, “Have you ever had a man die in your arms?” But in Thin Red Line, we get to hear their thoughts. Like a curious angel, we pass down the ranks from generals to privates, privy to their internal conversations and musings. We get to hear their motives for what they do. There is a main narrator, a philosophical medic, who is AWOL when the film opens, and heroic at the end, but his thoughts do not get in the way of others’. Unlike Tom Hank’s men in Private Ryan, these grunts get dirty, sweaty, sick and scared. Individuals pass from excitement to cringing fear as death marches among them, and they carry it’s swift sword. They laugh, they cheer and they cry. “I killed a man! It’s the worst thing you can do, worse than rape,” one man thinks. An arguable proposition, since the dead man does not have to live with his murder. But for most men, probably true in terms of its ramifications. What young enlisted are never told is the dirty secret that soldier’s take the dead with them for the rest of their lives. And the movie flashes back and forth from the lush natural beauty and teeming life of their island location to the horror and fear that death brings. Even the enemy in Thin Red Line is finally given a human face, with the surviving Japanese prisoners going through as full a range of emotions as their captors. There is no final moral to be had in this film, just like in the real experience. “Each man must live his own war” the ad says, and they do. The closest the film comes to a justification for war and its brutalities is the philosophical musing about the constant war between all elements of the natural world for survival and transformation. One clear irony of modern warfare is that heroism and cowardice have little or nothing to do with individual survival. Death comes randomly from the air, the land and the sea to take its victims.

“It doesn’t matter how good you are, if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time,” notes one war weary GI at the end of the film. By descending down the scale of military privileges, Thin Red Line also uncovers the role of class in military structure and thinking, a key concept that allowed the Vietnamese to distinguish between the people and the policy of the United States’ invasion, and between the officers and the enlisted in the field.

Until all of us finally face war and what it is as an experience, and look at the military as an institution within a democratic society, our arguments about conscience and morality will not have their desired effect. The unfinished debate of my generation, the genocidal war in Vietnam, has to be renewed before this nation ever finds its way again. In the silence, wars continue and new generations join them from all sides. No society in the modern era has had a lasting progressive change until the military within it was transformed. Anti-war activists must decide to own our military, not just shun it and pray for its disappearance. It’s time for us to “capture the flag” and begin the real debate about its size, structure, purpose, and personnel, and to drag the decisions about warmaking out of the national security closet.

I have found three recent books helpful in understanding the nature and experience of modern war. On Killing, by Col. Michael Grossman, reveals the actual technique used in basic training since Vietnam to break down natural human reluctance to kill another person. Grossman, a training officer, is honest enough to recognize that this training is never reversed at discharge, and the effects it is having on the society at large. One example is the high percentage of women spouses and lovers of GI’s and veterans who are being battered. The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War, by Samuel Haynes, is a perceptive review of the literature of war memoirs stretching from World War I to Vietnam, with all the differences noted. Again we are privy to seeing the wars from individual eyes and minds. A reviewer in the Washington Post said of Haynes’ work, “We need to know the truth of war, the soldier’s truth, because it is war, not peace, that is the normal condition of mankind.” While Gandhi would properly contend that peace and cooperation are much more “normal” but history only records conflict and war, we do need the “soldier’s truth” if we are ever going to end war. For an interesting look back at the emerging modern response of dissent in the ranks, read Richard Moser’s The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era. This now almost forgotten aspect of recent history was critical in ending the war. Even the Vietnamese ambassador to the United Nations credited the American GI movement to end the war as the second most important element in the victory of the Vietnamese people.

For the most part, the peace movement has not tapped the voices of enlisted and veterans, especially recent ones, though statistics show they are among our best advocates against militarism and war. We ignore the experience of war and those who fight in it at our peril. They and their families know the dirty little secret that stopped the war in Vietnam and that may bring all war to a halt some day. The best honor we could give to these veterans is to never have another war.

John Judge is a board member of the Washington Peace Center.

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