Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Real combat includes endless hours of boredom

By Carl Heintze

Saving Private Ryan, Hollywood's latest effort to deal with World War II, is out. It's widely touted as "realistic" to the point where children aren't supposed to see it. But young people apparently are seeing it to better understand the real horrors of war.

I have ambivalent feelings about it.

War certainly is hell. It also certainly should not be entertainment, although it often has been. But it has always been mankind's (and now also presumably womankind's) burden. We can't seem to do with war and we can't seem to do without it, even though we have managed to avoid the general conflagration which World War II became.

Saving Private Ryan, which would appear to be the first of a new wave of such redos of the Big War, manages to squeeze in the most intense and dramatic of all the battles of that conflict (from an American point of view, at least): D-Day, landing on the coast of Normandy.

The carnage at Omaha Beach was immense, as the movie takes great glee in depicting.

But D-Day was unique.

That was evident even when I came ashore there three months after it happened. Even then there were bodies bobbing about in the water, the immense trash that battle heaps on a battlefield was still there and we could only marvel at those who landed managed to climb the cliffs to the hedgerows and flat land which lay beyond.

But D-Day was not like most of World War II.

I also have to quibble with the rest of the picture, which sends good Capt. Miller and his eight men off in search of Private Ryan. In most Hollywood movies all officers are, like Capt. Miller, good and noble and brave--something not necessarily so in reality.

And why eight men? An infantry squad in World War II was supposed to consist of 12 men, although it often didn't.

Well, no matter, that's the squad Capt. Miller gets, and a motley crew they are, presumably like those in most World War II pictures, a cross-section of America.

It's a cross-section that doesn't include African Americans (they were still segregated in June 1944) or Hispanics; in fact, one might call the crew lily-white.

But I'm quibbling. And thinking of my own squad, also a motley crew: Jewish, Italian, Midwestern, Italian and Southern--to wit, Georgia and Mississippi. Not necessarily good men and true, but, like me, a confused lot.

My experience in combat (eight months) never featured a captain (usually in command of an infantry company, roughly 200 men) going anywhere with only eight men, especially in search of a single soldier, much reflection and few heroics.

I guess one has to chalk Capt. Miller up to poetic or dramatic license. The plot of Saving Private Ryan would apparently have been advanced if it had only been a sergeant entrusted with the mission. And in reality Private Ryan probably would not have gotten in the infantry in the first place if he'd had two brothers killed.

But no matter. Steven Spielberg, the film's producer, is trying to make a point. He is telling us war is terrible, but that sometimes it has to be fought for the right reasons. Or, put another way, that some sacrifice of human life is worth it.

I don't know if I believe this, either. Mostly I believe that war is demeaning. It also is immensely boring. A really realistic movie about infantry combat would soon lose its audience because there would be long periods when nothing would take place.

Being an infantry soldier means you're neither heroic or exalted. Most of the time you're just bored and bone-weary.

Most of the time on the front line, no one has much of an idea as to what is happening or why or what they are supposed to do.

One is moved from place to place for no apparent reason. One stands in the rain, cold and heat in odd places--hilltops, hay barns, under trees, up against fences simply because someone told you do so. They never told you why, though.

And one is scared. Usually it is not a specific terror, it is just great apprehension that something unpleasant, nasty or terrible is going to happen. Sometimes it does, but not very often. Most of the time not much of anything happens.

Nor does one often see the horrific messes depicted in the movie of Omaha Beach. Men get killed or lie on the ground and cry for help, but you can't see them, nor can you get to them to do anything for them.

You seldom if ever see the enemy. When you do, they are as wretched as you are and perhaps even more confused. Good and brave men get better and continue to be brave. But they often also get killed.

Bad guys, both on your side and among the enemy, seem to survive, probably because they seek shelter successfully before the good guys.

So, I suppose, you could say, so what?

I think my conclusion is that infantry combat can never be made as real as it really is. And if it were no one would want to sit for a couple hours being a part of it. At least I wouldn't.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.

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