Watching an HBO Miniseries

A guy lent me his 6 disk video Band of Brothers, a movie about a company in the 101st Airborne Division of the Army, the famous Screaming Eagles. It retells their role in WWII.

The video is very beautifully photographed and with the same intensity as Saving Private Ryan. This film is a saga that takes you from boot camp in 1942 until the end of the war in 1945. Supposedly it is historically accurate. The video has bits of interviews with the original historical characters. HBO did a big premiere and showed it to the original characters and their families, so obviously HBO is confident that it is close enough to historical reality.

I think it is an excellent video well worth the time to watch. It does make you think about people and the war, the violence, the wasted lives, the craziness of killing one day and making peace the next. It doesn't try to teach any moral lessons but you get a sense of how a group gels and the camaraderie of war, hence the title 'Band of Brothers'. I do know that my relatives that fought in WWII never talked about their experiences. Only those who were peripheral and never faced death would regale you with stories. I know my father came home from the war and spent a few months alone in the back 40 sitting on a fence pulling himself together after the war.

The one thing that bothered me about the video was the fact that in trying to be "realistic" they showed the seamy side of things. They showed the shooting of prisoners and looting. I know these things went on. I just don't think they went on to the extent shown in the film. Funny, when I was a kid the war movies never showed anything ignoble. Now the war films wallow in the ugly side of war. To my mind the truth lies somewhere in between. Yes people did bad things, but I believe that the average guy did a pretty honest job of it.

The one clear historical fiction was the surrender scene where Richard Winters, the major who ran 506th Batallion took the surrender of a German officer. In the video the German offers his pistol as part of the German military code of honourable surrender and Winters then hands it back. Well, the video interview with Winters makes it clear that he kept the pistol. But Winters does make the comment that the German officer had never fired that weapon and Winters never fired it and that Winters wished very badly that the day would come when "wars" happened where no weapon would ever be fired. The video distorts truth to make a point about honour, but I like Winters' real action much more than the Hollywood version.

One bit I really liked from this video was an interview where
Winters quoted a passage from a letter he received from Sergeant Mike Ranney, "'I cherish the memories of a question my grandson asked me the other day when he said, Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?' Grandpa said 'No… but I served in a company of heroes…'" This is refreshing because today the idea of "hero" has been so watered down with everybody and his dog being called a "hero" that the term is worthless. Winters is from the old school where "hero" was a term that put a person on a pedestal and where good men held back from calling themselves "heroes".