 |
| (Apologies to Lynn Johnson for appropriating her work) |
i grew up watching "Victory at Sea," The World at War," and many other WWII documentaries. 40's & 50's era war movies were regular fare on afternoon, after school TV programming. War was all around us in a nation that had been almost untouched compared to the carnage that was experienced in Europe and the Pacific, and images of the dead and dying were edited to the minimum in the films. We had toy rifles and grenades and some of us had uniforms and military gear from the surplus stores or our fathers' attics. We built models of warplanes and warships. We staged battles. War was cool to us, and our war veteran fathers and survivor parents and grand parents said almost nothing to us about it -unlike Mike's mom. Soon, many of my contemporaries and our elder siblings were sent off to a real shooting war in Asia, and the survivors returned profoundly changed and shaken by the experience, having learnt the hard lesson that General Sherman was understating things when he said, "War is Hell."
I think that one can romanticize war only if one hasn't been in it.
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't so much that we romanticized war as that it was just a movie to us. Few of the people in our lives who had actually experienced war ever really spoke of it- either to us kids or even each other. One of my friends' fathers had been at Iwo Jima, another flew missions over Germany in the USAAF- neither ever spoke of it to us even as they saw us playing soldier. The films we watched were for the most part sanitized of scenes of human carnage, and we kids had no clue what it really meant to lose loved ones and homes, etc., to war. The closest i ever got to hear of it was my father once telling me about his having been under a zeppelin bombing raid during the Great War.
ReplyDeletei greatly worry about our nation when politicians (and other civilians) seem all too eager to send our armed forces into harm's way when they themselves have never themselves witnessed war.