Did you watch the Ken Burns film series on PBS called “The War”? If not, probably you should. This series doesn’t glorify war, or glamorize it, or paint our soldiers as angels and the soldiers on the opposite side as devils. It doesn’t pretend that war is good for children or other living things. Nor does it concentrate on strategy or tactics, such topics having been covered often and sometimes excellently in the past half century. (I think, for instance, of the films called “Victory at Sea.”) Instead, “The War” concentrates on the human side, civilian as well as military, of a society at war.
I have heard that some people decided not to watch it because they disapprove of war. But it seems to me that if that generation could go through it, we can go through watching it.
It makes painful watching.
I began reading about the war while I was still in my early teens, as the first spate of histories were coming out. After so much reading, I would have thought that all I could learn at this point would be detail. But until I watched an ex-fighter pilot named Quentin Aanenson talk about his experiences, I never fully understood that the boys who had to fight were scarred not just by what had happened to them, but by what they had had to do. Continue reading Aanenson’s sacrifice