Saving Private Ryan
Produced by Steven Spielberg
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Screenplay by Robert Rodat
Released by Paramount and DreamWorks SKG

If you visit the American cemeteries near the beaches at Normandy—there are two of them—you may pick up a booklet describing the landings of June 6, 1944, as I did over 15 years ago. Under the listing for “Omaha,” the anonymous historian wrote that

the 1st U.S. Infantry Division landed here from 6.30 . . . however, there was a rough sea at the foot of the cliffs. The first assault suffered heavy losses . . . the beach had not been cleared of anti-invasion devices, and the tide was rising. . . . A few assault groups reached the top of the beach. . . . The Pointe du Hoc was climbed and captured by 225 Rangers. . . . This was the most difficult of the landings.

I study these words as I walk across the Colleville-St-Laurent cemetery on a surprisingly blustery summer day, overcast and damp. The cemetery is the final resting place of some 9,386 Americans killed in the battle for Normandy, and the debris of war—obstacles set up by Rommel to impede an invasion and the pill boxes on the summit of Pointe du Hoc—is still there, jutting from the sand and the stone like bizarre post-modern sculptures. Descending to the beach and walking in the direction of the Ranger assault at Pointe du Hoc, I discover that the water is numbingly cold and that the heights above the beach gave the Germans the deadly high ground. A “difficult” landing. “Heavy losses.”

The white crosses at Colleville-St-Laurent, punctuated by a Star of David here and there, are spread across a striking green sward, enclosed by trees and backing up to a monument and a simple stone wall. It is the wall I’ve come for. The 19-year-old sergeant I pay homage to is not interred here, or anywhere. I snap a picture of the inscription. All that is left is a shudder as I recall the grief of a Gold Star mother who never quite got over the loss of her eldest son. My namesake. I feel a mixture of sorrow and envy. The picture of the war most of us have is the bloodless epic of The Longest Day or the episodic drama of the old Combat TV series. The Last Good War. Dudley Doright Meets the Waffen SS. But a visit here taps us on our mental shoulders to let us know that it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like anything we—the ones who weren’t there or someplace like it—have ever known.

Saving Private Ryan is the film for which Steven Spielberg will probably be most remembered. Watching Ryan, the audience has its consciousness jolted and its understanding of war deepened. The film’s first 25 minutes are an exhausting and exhilarating depiction of the Omaha landing. A storm of fire and death greets the GIs as the door of the landing craft drops. Men drown, weighed down by equipment in the chilling waters, and the audience is pulled from the comfort of the theater by a dreadful assault on the senses. Blood and body parts, screams and shouts, and unbelievable bravery make up the terrifying mosaic of Ryan’s Omaha sequence.

There is in this film sorrow and callousness, heroism and cowardice, fear and the comradeship that only a closely knit group of men in dire circumstances feels. The east—led by Tom Hanks as Captain John Miller, a Pennsylvania school teacher dropped into the unlikely role of leader of men in the deadly maneuvers of war; Tom Sizemore as Sergeant Horvath; Edward Burns as Private Reiben; and Matt Damon as the elusive Iowa farm boy, Private James Francis Ryan—pulls off a remarkably natural portrayal of young men bound by fate and uncommon love, spurred on by the heightened sensory experience of war, deprivation, and sudden death. Miller and his men are given an unlikely mission: find and save young Ryan, whose three brothers have been killed. General Marshall, portrayed by Harve Presnell, has given the order: Mrs. Ryan will not lose her only remaining son.

Spielberg, the proverbial Hollywood liberal (a breed not renowned for its love of Middle America), is paying tribute to the sons of Boise and Brooklyn and Birmingham for the awful sacrifice they made. To set the tone, Spielberg pays homage to John Ford’s The Searchers, while noting the landscape of a most American director’s The Grapes of Wrath: As Mrs. Ryan is notified of the loss of three sons, she is framed in a farmhouse door, looking out on stretches of amber waves of grain, while she is approached by the messenger from one side, a preacher from the other. Some conservatives have already attacked the film for not glorifying the war, for stressing the horrors of war over its sometime necessity, perhaps for being anti-American, but the audience’s empathy for the characters is excited precisely because these me American boys facing those horrors: Ryan‘s GIs are not speechifying flag wavers, but common men who have set out to do a dirty job. Of course they love their country and feel a sense of duty, and Spielberg has chosen to portray that patriotism in their reminiscing about home, loved ones, and the simple beauty of their common lives. But war means fighting, and fighting means killing. Ryan‘s GIs mow down the enemy with brutal abandon and take reprisals against a disarmed German who has killed a buddy. The squad’s Jewish member taunts German prisoners. These are the normal reflexes of war, and it is about time they were honestly portrayed. Perhaps those who pass for conservatives in the late 1990’s, who seem to like war, any war, could learn a thing or two by reviewing the thinking of some of their forefathers, who saw things differently.

Others see Ryan as yet another Hollywood attack on Christianity. While it is obvious to any thinking person that the Hollywood of the 1990’s is hardly friendly to the Christian faith, it is also painful to observe how squeamish conservative Christians have become. No, Ryan’s Christians would not be model members of any organization dreamed up by Ralph Reed. Jackson, the unit’s sniper, is a dead-on impersonation of what any white Southerner would readily recognize as a type as old as the republic: Jackson is Sergeant York. As he sets the sights of his rifle, Jackson recites the 144th Psalm: “Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight . . . my deliverer; my shield, and he in whom I trust.” It has been a long time since Christians had that kind of faith.

The question that Ryan gets at—why do men sacrifice themselves?—is something more important than jingoism, something more elemental than the often superficial patriotic gore of filmdom, and something today’s conservatives are trying hard to forget, which just may be why we are losing our country. The film’s final, bloody sequence is reminiscent of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Ryan‘s GIs are faced with a difficult moral situation—again, something today’s conservatives often have trouble with—as they question the sense of the mission they are on. Why risk eight lives—six of which will be lost—to save one, and why this one? (“I have a mother too,” quips one of Ryan’s dogfaces.)

Ultimately, Ryan is about redemption and brotherhood. Like Peckinpah’s outlaws, the men of Ryan have killed much, often instinctively, without thinking. Tom Hanks’ Captain Miller reflects that he has necessarily rationalized killing as a means of saving lives: “Our objective is to win the war,” snaps Miller, and, by implication, to end it. But “every man I’ve killed” takes “me further away” from home, from humanity. Ryan must be saved, says Tom Sizemore’s Sergeant Horvath, because we are here and it may be “the one decent thing”—like the outlaws’ decision to save the captured Angel even if they must all die trying—to come out of this war. In the end, Ryan’s GIs fight for redemption (an idea that Christians should see as positive; all of us, even heroes, who have taken on the deadly burden of duty, are in need of grace) and brotherhood. Once the decision is made—Ryan must be saved—they will fight to the end. Loyalty, friendship, kinship, the bonds of shared experience — these are the causes conservatives once rallied to, the only causes that are worth the hell fire of war. Unlike stock-market quotes, they cannot be rationalized or calculated. They have little to do with the “national interests” of the state. There is no cost-benefit analysis that can explain the Alamo or Omaha Beach.

If mainstream conservatives can benefit from reflections on Ryan’s moral conundrums, liberals, who seem to take joy in spitting on Middle America, should pause a moment to reflect on the legacy of the Omaha Beach generation. The men who stormed the beaches were white, mostly Christians, from working or middle class backgrounds. They defeated Hitler as well as the “supermen” fanatics of the SS, and liberated the death camps. Their collective conscience reacted to blacks’ pleas for decency at home. Their culture made this country prosperous, and the Constitution is written in their language. If the liberals and professional victims persist in calling us, the sons and daughters of that generation, “fascists” or “brownshirts” (as one liberal senator called Pat Buchanan’s backers during the 1996 campaign), then they should be forewarned: Some of us are not prepared to see the sacrifice of a generation squandered, nor the country they built given away without a fight. War is hell.