About 8 years ago a movie came out. My parents went to go see it. I wanted to go with them, but they talked me into staying with grandma. When they came back from the theatre, they were silent. It was a sad, almost reverant silence. I didn't even think about a movie that could get my father to cry.
About two years later, i heard about it again in my social studies class. The kids were raving about it. I felt like the only one who hadn't seen it. They described it as if it were a sort of "shoot-'em-up" gangbusters film. At that point, i wanted to see it so badly, just to fit in. I went home and asked my parents. They shook their heads and said that I was too young.
About two years ago, I was sitting at home with my grandmother thinking about some of the films i had always wanted to see and i mentioned that movie. My grandmother looked at me and said, "Yeah, I think you can handle it. It's not an enjoyable movie, but it is amazing." I nodded and said that i was ready for anything.
That day, we went to the video rental place and picked the movie up. I watched it in silent horror and pain. After the first twenty minutes I kinda wanted to shut it off and walk away, but I stayed put. I figured that this was the closest i was going to come to even barely understanding what those people went through. I felt terrible that war is so glorified and the dead are only numbers. It made me think about things that I had never thought about before.
I'm pretty sure that this week has been labled "Holocaust Rememberance Week." We walked into Mr. Wynn's class laughing about our conversation with Mr. Holst from last period. Mr. Wynn mentioned that he was showing Saving Private Ryan to some of his classes. I jumped a bit. Then Sasha had the audacity to bash the movie with only having seen the first ten minutes (or so he said). I shook my head. He said that it was just another war movie; nothing even remotely different about it. Mr. Wynn tried to tell him that it brought in a terrible human mortality aspect and that was what made it so amazing. And Sasha said, "So how can you make an entire movie about saving one man?" Mr. Wynn sighed and said that he was going to show us the part after the horrific beginning where they are typing the telegrams. But Sasha said that the beginning was plain and that it was a good thing we were skipping it. So Mr. Wynn stopped the tape, rewound it and started it from the beginning. Sasha was silent. The one time he opened his mouth dureing the entire thing his voice was shakey and broken up. He said, "What the hell were they thinking? How were they going to get up that beach?" And then he was silent again. I was silent, everyone was silent. I wanted to cry, I know everyone felt the same. And even though he had seen it a million times, Mr. Wynn was still rivveted to it with watering eyes.
It was horrific. Horrific in its true nature. No ghosts or supernaturals. No hack-saw murders. No talking dolls. Just plain, brutal reality and that was what made it so terrible. Reality is scary and nothing else really is. We watch "horror" movies for the shock value, but to sit down and see reality is the scariest things of all. Words and numbers mean nothing. It's seeing it and hearing it that counts. And even though it was an amazing movie, it was still nothing compared to what those veterans went through.
So yeah, I just wanted to write that down.
God bless those who fight and die for what they believe in...
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1 comment:
It's been along time since I've read your blog, but I came back.
This post gives me hope. I don't know who 'typical' your friends are (I know that you are unusually mature for your age from your writing), but your reaction to Saving Private Ryan (SPR) is a good thing.
While you mention the opening sequence of the landing on the beach, the crazy thing is that despite those things going on, tens of thousands of men still did it. They walked through that 500 meters of random death. Every step of the way they could have been seriously injured or even killed, but they did it.
These were not supermen. They were not professional stuntmen, nor were they cold to the core, stone hearted killers. These were just soldiers.
I was recently sitting in a class, (A rather boring one that I have taken before, but was forced to give another week of my life to it again.) and at the end of the week the instructor decided he would drive home some of the topics we had talked about. (Mostly Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) awareness.)
Just to give you some perspective, I am a Civil Engineer in the Navy. I am specifically trained to manage and lead the men and women who are trained to build things in a "contingency" environment. And I did for 7 months last year. You could say that I am a soldier in a generic sense, but my job is to be an engineer. That's what I went school for, and that's what I do. Did I carry a loaded weapon over there? Yes. Did I have to use it? No.
But I travelled a lot to help other organizations with their engineering needs. (Both Iraqi and US forces.) So I was on the road quite a bit.
Back to my point... So here I am in this class, sitting in southern California, and I see this video footage taken from the inside of a Humvee driving for a freeway in Iraq. And I was back there, sitting in the back seat of a Humvee, scanning the side of the road ahead as best I could for anything that looked suspicious that could have blown us up. I sat in that seat firmly gripping my M16, looking intently out the windows for ANYTHING that didn't look right. Moving at 55 mph. You blink and three hours have passed and you're at your destination.
I only went on three road trips like that. (I perfered to travel by helicopter) But that thirty second video brought it all back. And in that video there was an explosion, and people were hurt.
I think about the guys, who everyday, for months at a time go outside the protective walls, and drive through the countryside of a unsafe area, and all I think is, "How do you sleep at night?"
World War II was a hundred times worst. Vietnam was a thousand times worst. (For different reasons.)
It's weird. I wish I could articulate it better, but being in an environment like that, doing something worthwhile, is kind of addictive. Seven months passed pretty fast, and I came back to a little boy who was just baby when I left. I came back to a news camera in my face asking me about my thoughts on the fact 2000 US troops had died in three years over there. Surreal. I came back to a place where I could walk down the street without body armor and perferrably a machine gun close by to cover you.
I came back to a public which for the most part remains blissfully ignorant to the condition of the world outside of our large piece of heaven. Hell, that was me a couple years ago.
And with that, I think I'll leave off. Keep up the great work with your writing.
~jp
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