The American Spectator

Reader Mail

(Page 7 of 18)

Why We Fight . It is probably monumentally impertinent for a guy born in 1952 to write this, but I severely doubt that anybody who actually lived through the European, Italian, African or Pacific Theaters at that time needed anybody from Hollywood to clarify for them why they were lying in the mud, the snow, the jungles, the lice and the louses, and with death of every living thing such a constant occurrence that death itself became... ordinary. p>But in a curious coincidence and/or slip of conscience, Spielberg and Hanks chose to name "Band of Brothers" episode nine of ten "Why We Fight." Hollywood's most brilliant, most powerful, richest director, who gave us all the reason but none of the fighting in "Schindler's List," then all the fighting but none of the reason in "Saving Private Ryan," finally grudgingly put both together albeit in an isolated one of ten episode. Had Capra delivered the Spielberg/Hanks filming of Steven Ambrose's accounting of the 101st Airborne's 506 PIR Easy Company from training in the USA to ultimate triumph at Berchtesgaden, it is questionable whether homebound Americans could have "taken it." Today, most of them just don't care, like the Hadleyville judge explaining to High Noon's Marshall Will Kane why the townspeople would prove unavailable. p>If you talk to guys who were there, the few we have left, they all understand Why We Fight or why we fought, but their recollections are so very different than Hollywood's or we homebound Americans could imagine. It took one of their own, Charles MacDonald, in his first literary work after returning from the ETO, "Company Commander", to put the whole experience, including Why We Fight , into perspective. Read Company Commander , Mac's ETO auto-bio, and your overwhelming reaction is "this is not John Wayne...these guys must have really hated to be there." Then Mac describes his and his company's final days in Czechoslovakia, liberating one last town before pulling back to the Potsdam declared borders. The most sincere and deep gratitude of the Czech townspeople, the way they let their liberating Americans know how much they were eternally in their debt, finally and convincingly clarified for Mac and his men "Why We Fight." p>The dominant media contrives today to censor reporting of any Afghan or Iraq village that might remind anyone of Mac's Czech village. But war and people do not change that much. It happened. It just wasn't "fit to print." BR>-- Frank Natoli BR>Newton, New Jersey p>

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