Soldier's Home : WWII

From LIFE Photo Archive: Soldiers in Action Through the Decades

David Botti — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:41:48 GMT

Recently Google announced it had digitized and uploaded images from the LIFE magazine photo archive, many of which have never been published before. At present Google says only 20 percent of LIFE's archive is online, but the end goal is to have 10 million images available. To do your own searches visit here.

19-Year-Old Woman Earns Silver Star

David Botti — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:17:10 GMT

In the realm of military awards, history was recently made when the military announced a 19-year-old soldier would become only the second woman since WWII to receive the Silver Star. Monica Lin Brown, an Army medic who served in Afghanistan, will be recognized for her quick thinking when her convoy was attacked by a roadside bomb last April. From the AP:

After the explosion, which wounded five soldiers in her unit, Brown ran through insurgent gunfire and used her body to shield wounded comrades as mortars fell less than 100 yards away, the military said.
“I did not really think about anything except for getting the guys to a safer location and getting them taken care of and getting them out of there,” Brown told The Associated Press on Saturday at a U.S. base in the eastern province of Khost.

“We stopped the convoy. I opened up my door and grabbed my aid bag,” Brown said.

She started running toward the burning vehicle as insurgents opened fire. All five wounded soldiers had scrambled out.

“So we dragged them for 100 or 200 meters, got them away from the Humvee a little bit,” she said. “I was in a kind of a robot-mode, did not think about much but getting the guys taken care of.”

For Brown, who knew all five wounded soldiers, it became a race to get them all to a safer location. Eventually, they moved the wounded some 500 yards away, treated them on site before putting them on a helicopter for evacuation.

According to the AP, Army nurses in WWI and WWII previously received the Silver Star, and female soldier in Iraq earned the award in 2005. As for Brown, she has a little more than a month left to serve in Afghanistan, until she can once again see her family back in Texas.

And now, the 19-year-old can even read about herself on Wikipedia.

The Image of a Veteran

David Botti — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:18:35 GMT

The current series in the New York Times on veterans who've committed murder has spurred tremendous debate over the way vets are portrayed by the media. To understand origins of the prevailing portrayals of our current veterans, it's a good idea to take a step back and view the issue in a historical perspective.

Jerry Lembcke is a Vietnam veteran and professor of sociology at Holly Cross college in Worcester, Massachusetts. Lembcke's book "The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam," looked in part at how the news media and pop-culture cultivated narrow portrayals of Vietnam vets. He has also written op-eds for the Boston Globe, Newsday, and the San Francisco Chronicle among others. In 1968 Lembcke was drafted into the Army, serving as chaplain's assistant before returning home and joining the anti-war movement.

I talked to Lembcke about how the Vietnam-era vets experience impacts that of those men and women coming home from war today -- and how he thinks the media is handling its coverage of veterans and issues associated with them.

SOLDIER'S HOME: You've written that a veteran's behavior can be influenced more from how past vets were portrayed in pop-culture, as opposed to personal experiences he/she might have had. How specifically does this happen?

LEMBCKE: The post-Vietnam popular culture representations of veterans was so powerful and so long lasting, and it so overwhelmed the war itself in popular culture, that as people began to come home during the Gulf War in the 1990’s, and present these same symptoms as Vietnam veterans coming back, I thought there’s a connection here. I think I used the phrase “learned experience,” and it occurred to me that this was a generation of veterans who’d grown up immersed in this popular culture of what it looks like to be a war veteran coming home.

This was very different than the culture Vietnam vets grew up in. Looking at representations of WWII veterans for example, which was not nearly as powerful in film for example. We got more war films about WWII, but not so many films about veterans coming home.

What is being portrayed in these kinds of movies that can influence veterans?

In the Vietnam war movies it was the dysfunctional, deranged, and even dangerous vet. I looked at about 100 films that portrayed Vietnam vets in them, and there wasn’t a single film that portrayed a healthy, functional veteran. So, what we see among other things is a lot of violence, the war brought home in a psychological sense, and even sometimes Hollywood portrayed guys coming home with their hand grenades and weapons and used those on the street.

Now we’re seeing one of the main representations of Iraq war veterans coming home is in the press with the violent crimes they’re committing. A lot of stories read to me like a lot of press reports and fictional representations of Vietnam vets that guys can’t leave the war behind them. They come home and they act out these war scenarios on the streets.

Is there a way the press can report on crimes committed by returning veterans without having such representations be the result?

Look at the current series the New York Times is running. The first in the series reported that one third of the violence is against spouses, girlfriends, and children. What this shows is a problem of masculinity and sense of worth as a man that perhaps the war has affected. These kinds of acts of violence against women and children are ways of acting out on that. Those are the kinds of stories that should be reported rather than this kind of pedestrian-type story of people coming home scared, and they’ve been trained up to act on their fears militarily

So it’s an issue of the press making the issue too black and white, and not attending to the gray areas?

The press is asking the wrong questions. They’re asking what is it about the military experience that causes these guys to act out like this, rather than asking what it is about the military culture (and even the culture of America) that requires men’s self esteem to somehow be related to their war experience.

You’ve said that it’s possible the behavior of Iraq veterans is influenced by past portrayals of Vietnam veterans. Is it possible reporters are also influenced by these pop culture images of Vietnam vets?

That exactly right. What we need to ask is, why did this story sound true to the reporter? What is the reporter herself bringing into this situation of reporting that leads her to think that this story is true when she hears it. These people live in the same culture you and I live in. They go to the same movies, they read the same books, they hear the same kinds of stories. Their sense of what is right is based on the same cultural references as the rest of us.

You’ve done some research on the origin of the term “PTSD.” There are some who say that the term is overused in talking about Iraq veterans. How was it used when it first came out?

I went back and looked at how PTSD came into being in the first place as a diagnostic category. I think it was attractive to the press at the time because it served a cultural and political function. It was inviting because it displaced from public view the fact that a lot of people were returning from Vietnam opposed to the war. The attractiveness of PTSD was that it re-spun the coming home story. It might have been attractive to journalists for reasons of basic liberal humanitarianism or even guilt that they didn’t go to the war. They were finding some way to speak sympathetically to the experience of people coming home from war. That may be what’s happening again. These stories [in the today’s press] are written very good heartedly. They’re not attempts to slander Iraq war veterans, as some critics seem to suggest they do. But, going back to Vietnam vets there was a stigma surrounding them. That’s the hidden danger that if indeed journalists are writing these stories because they are sympathetic, and they want to do something good for Iraq war veterans, in the long run they might be doing some damage.

What about how we use the term “PTSD” today?

PTSD had prominence in the press so quickly because that’s where the Vietnam-era story leaves off. That was sort of the easy tag line for them. Lots and lots of analogies. These stories are written with phrases such as: “it’s like with Vietnam-era veterans.” These stories are full of those kinds of tag lines. And they’re apparently written like that as a way of engaging the reader at the level that the writer assumes the reader is at. They assume correctly that the readers are coming out of a historical period in which they’ve been immersed in these images of PTSD and war veterans.

The American public remembers what happened to Vietnam vets when they came home much more then they remember the war itself. The war in Vietnam has really faded in American memory, but people have these very sharp images of the spitting incidents and PTSD. Because those are the images that have hung on in popular culture, and I think it’s almost certain that will happen with the war in Iraq--that the coming home narrative is going to displace the history of the war itself. And that could happen quite quickly.

The Deaths of Two More Lone Survivors

David Botti — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:45:56 GMT

Last week Soldier's Home took a look at the passing of Louis de Cazenave, one of France's two remaining WWI veterans. Since then we've heard news of two more veterans dying as the final representatives from a fading era.

Erich Kaestner, said to be Germany's last surviving WWI veteran, is making headlines not so much for his death but for the amount of time it took to realize his significance. He died on January 1 at the age of 107, but it was not until recently that word got out he was Germany's last living link to the Great War. As the BBC reports:

Reports in Die Welt daily and Der Spiegel magazine identified Kaestner as Germany's last World War I veteran, but verification of the claim was difficult as the country keeps no record of its war veterans.

In a country where the shame of the Nazi genocide and memories of two world war defeats still cast long shadows, both publications focused more on the German national psyche than the death itself.

"The German public was within a hair's breadth of never learning of the end of an era," wrote Der Spiegel, until someone updated his death notice on the internet encyclopaedia site, Wikipedia.

In its obituary for Kaestner, Die Welt noted: "The losers hide themselves in a state of self-pity and self denial that they happily try to mitigate by forgetting."

CBC News has Der Spiegel magazine's interview with an official from Germany's Military Research Institute. He offers us a better understanding how Germany views its veterans:

"Any form of commemoration of military events is seen as problematic here," Chiari told Spiegel Online.

"Our veterans only take part in public ceremonies when they are invited abroad to join commemorative events with veterans from other countries. World War I is seen as part of a historical line that led to World War II. You can't equate the two but there is much debate about it."

Before word of Kaestner's death, and as world headlines focused on the passing of France's de Cazenave, over here in the U.S., the veteran of a war obscure to many Americans died on January 14th. Milton Wolff, 92, was the last surviving commander of American volunteers fighting in the Spanish Civil War, a conflict which pitted Franco's fascist forces against a fragmented leftist army headed by Spain's government. Among those serving on the government's side were thousands of international volunteers. According to news reports Wolff left a factory job in New York City and traveled to Spain inspired by his membership in the Young Communist League. Adventure is what he got. From the LA Times:

Wolff traveled to France on an ocean liner, hiked across the Pyrenees Mountains and began his work on the battlefield carrying water for a machine gun company. Initially, his plan was to be a medic; he was a pacifist and did not want to kill. But he was inspired by the African American commander of a machine gun unit, and soon Wolff found that others were inspired by his own leadership...

...In Spain, Wolff met Ernest Hemingway, who famously compared the tall, gaunt Wolff to Abraham Lincoln in a 1938 piece that appears in "Spanish Portraits." Hemingway also detailed Wolff's battles and ascent to commander.

Wolff was later barred from combat duty in the U.S. Army during WWII because of his service in Spain. From the NY Times:

Mr. Wolff said he was turned down for combat duty in World War II because of concerns about his leftist politics. He later fought successfully against the “subversive” label pinned on the Lincoln veterans for decades.

Most American volunteers during the war fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade whose archives are located in downtown New York City. This month their Website features a remarkable look at a piece of America's history in the Spanish Civil War—a letter written by a volunteer to his mother explaining the reasons he's decided to fight in Spain. He was also, reportedly, the last American killed during that war. View the letter as a PDF file here.

Vet Issues Portrayed in 1946 Still Completely Relevant

David Botti — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:04:48 GMT

It's been widely reported recently that movies dealing with veterans and the Iraq war are mostly flopping at the box office. Peoples' opinions on the cause of this are varied, but a common line of thinking is that it's just too soon. Recently, however, I came across a movie from 1946 which astounded me in the accuracy and relevance of the veterans issues addressed. The movie is called "The Best Years of Our Lives," and while it won the 1947 Oscar for best picture I'd never heard about it until my father mentioned the film at the Christmas dinner table.

If conventional wisdom within my own generation believes that many mainstream movies from that time period are sanitized and fail to address complex issues, "The Best Years of Our Lives" is an exception. The film traces the lives of three WWII veterans and their return to a small town and their families. One of the actors, Harold Russell, was a veteran himself and lost both hands while serving in the U.S. Army.

While watching the movie I was struck how veterans of Iraq could easily replace these WWII-era characters. We see their apprehension as one-by-one a taxi drops the men off at their respective homes. None of the vets want to get out of the car, and face their families for the first time. The ensuing story line involves alcoholism, depression, joblessness, financial troubles, broken relationships, and opposition to the war. Even among their families and old friends the vets feel out of place, with images of their wartime experience always present. The plot is subtle and methodical. In portraying the assimilation of these vets back into civilian society, we see how they initially depend on each other, and how they eventually come to depend on their families as well.

Pearl Harbor Memories After 66 Years

David Botti — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 16:29:57 GMT

A quick roundup of news articles commemorating the 66th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. A primary theme of many of the pieces: the dwindling number of Pearl Harbor veterans still alive.

An editorial from the Cincinnati Post has a particularly poignant message:
Every December, on or around the 7th, I would write about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. My concern, even back then, was that we had begun to forget the significance of that day, not just to us, but to the entire world.

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer:
[87-year-old Alex] Haynes' voice faltered as he recalled seeing what remained of the battleship Arizona where 1,177 sailors and Marines died in the heartbeat of a massive explosion. "Those men never knew what hit them," he said. "Maybe, in a way, it was a blessing."...That's why he never returned to Pearl Harbor after the war. "I never wanted to go back," Haynes said. "I always try to keep in my mind, pictures of the way it used to be before the attack."

From the LA Times:
The exact number of Pearl Harbor survivors, though unknown, is smaller, and they are older than the average WWII veteran. [Jack Ray] Hammett, a former Costa Mesa mayor, said he liked to think of his buddies as "walking, living history."

From the Baltimore Sun:
[The] national survivors group decided that last year's anniversary gathering at Pearl Harbor would be the last in Hawaii. The group would meet there every five years, but now it's just too hard for the survivors, most of whom are in their 80s and 90s, to travel so far.

The Associated Press takes a look at the civilian victims of the attack:
Children carried gas masks to the playground. Military officers commanded civilian courts under martial law. Residents feared enemy troops would parachute into the mountains and then swarm the beaches...This year's 66th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor offers reminders of how the assault upended the lives of Hawaii's civilians, in addition to the severe damage inflicted on the military.

Here's some good archival footage of the attack from Encyclopedia Britannica:

Best in War Reporting: Ernie Pyle on a Soldier's Death

David Botti — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 13:43:20 GMT

An occasional series highlighting some of the most thoughtful and informative combat reporting throughout America's history at war.

Today's Best in War Reporting comes from the legendary combat correspondent Ernie Pyle at the Italian front in WWII. With a simplicity of words and observations, Pyle manages to knock you over as he writes of the moments surrounding a young company commander's death. In his words you can almost hear his own exhaustion as he holds back tears. It begins:

AT THE FRONT LINES IN ITALY, January 10, 1944 - In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas...I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow's body down. The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley below. Soldiers made shadows in the moonlight as they walked. Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules. They came lying belly-down across the wooden pack-saddles, their heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking out awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mule walked.

The narrative continues as Pyle evokes an almost bizarre scene as Capt. Waskow's body is removed from the mule and placed with the other bodies of U.S. soldiers. The empathy with which Pyle treats this moment is a grim foreshadowing of his own future in the war. Like Capt. Waskow, Pyle was loved universally by the troops; and like Capt. Waskow, Pyle would not make it home from the war alive. He was killed the following April by sniper fire on one of the Japanese islands.

As Capt. Waskow's men begin to pay their last respects, Pyle manages to convey how even their short remarks are far more emotional than they might seem on the surface.

One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, "God damn it." That's all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, "God damn it to hell anyway." He looked down for a few last moments, and then he turned and left.
Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain's face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: "I'm sorry, old man."
Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said:
"I sure am sorry, sir."

But, of course, the soldiers (and Pyle) must get ready to continue fighting the next day.

After that the rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.

Witnessing the moments he described Pyle showed that at a moment when his own emotions may have dominated his thoughts, his ability to step back, observe, and convey never left his writing.

Interview: Ken Burns on WWII Vets [Part 3]

David Botti — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 14:11:11 GMT

Today's post is the last in a three-part series of interviews with filmmaker Ken Burns. His 15-hour documentary, "The War," looked at life on the battlefield and homefront during WWII. Excerpts:

S.H.: What was it like living with the images of war for six years during the making of the film?

BURNS: It was very very tough. I mean we like to say, and it’s a dishonor to anyone within the sound of my voice who’s actually experienced combat, to say we used to have kind of our own minor versions of PTSD because we had to look at horrible footage. We looked at thousands of hours of footage to get our 15 hours of film. We looked at tens of thousands of still photographs, some of the most gruesome carnage. And while our film is difficult to watch, and shows in an unmitigated, unmediated fashion the horror of war, nonetheless it isn’t the worst we’ve seen.

We didn’t want to gratuitously shock anybody. There are difficult images, but we left the most difficult images of children, of women, of soldiers deeply maimed, guts spilling out on the battlefield, of the worst kind of depravity that takes place in war, out of our film. But we ourselves had to find out what it was like. And we’d often, many of us, recount the stories of in the editing process, the long solitary editing process, of going home at night and dreaming--finding ourselves not just filmmakers in the editing room trying to solve the problems of the Battle of Peleliu, for example, or the Battle of the Bulge, but finding ourselves in that battle. [We were] realizing, ‘wait a second, we’re filmmakers without guns--why are we here?’ And waking up in cold sweats with nightmares, coming in hollow-eyed with sleep and finding out the editor, or producer across the table had felt the same thing, or something similar in a different battle.

It was very difficult, but what kept us going, and I don’t mean to play up any real difficulties--we had the luxury of being at home, none of us were called up to do the actual fighting that takes place--is that we were compelled along, carried along, buoyed by the stories that we had collected. [From] the 40-odd people that we’d gotten to know intimately, people we’d said in our early boiler plate language paid lip service to the notion that these people would be like family members, somebody you might have had Thanksgiving with. By the end I can tell you that they do feel like family members. We lost Earl Burke. We lost Ray Leopold in the last few months. And we all felt a great deal of sadness as if someone really close to us had died. With Ray Leopold, from Waterbury, I actually broke down and cried, as if it had been my own grandfather.

[Part 1] [Part 2]

Interview: Ken Burns on WWII Vets [Part 2]

David Botti — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 14:56:25 GMT

Yesterday Soldier’s Home posted the first in a three-part series of interview excerpts from a discussion with filmmaker Ken Burns. His new seven-part documentary, "The War," follows the WWII generation on the battlefields and on the home front. In the previous post we learned how Burns went about interviewing veterans on the emotional subject of their wartime experiences. Today’s excerpts:

S.H.: One of the veterans said something in the film that really struck me. He said, “you don’t expect death among people your own age.”

BURNS: Yes, that was Sam Hynes who is professor emeritus of literature from Princeton University. Sam got it very very well. What happens is that young men do the fighting because they’re the ones who particularly have a sense of their own immortality, their own invincibility. That’s why most car accidents are teenagers, 17 or 18-years-old, who think they can drive as fast as they want and [then] can’t make that turn. And we read the tragedies almost daily in our newspapers.

We actually enlist young men to do the fighting and the dying, because they have that willingness to do the stuff that we just look back and say I can’t believe he’d do that. I think [Sam] began to understand that moment that other soldiers described of arriving going, ‘I have no fear, but when the fighting started, yikes, what have I gotten into.’

Here is this notion that as the war began to grind on in the first year, and the casualties mounted, that this was a real thing. Only old people, he said, die. But, suddenly people your own age were dying and it wasn’t too far a leap to realize that you too may die. And then all of the sudden that limitlessness that we feel, however myopically, that we’re going to live forever is suddenly very really ripped from you. And war becomes a wholly different thing. ‘Yes I could die. We’re all gonna die. But it’s gonna to happen to grandpa and great-grandpa, it’s not gonna happen to me.'

This is a huge metaphysical calculus that we couldn’t possibly really truly understand, and we hope by approaching war to get a sense, get a glimmer of what it’s like.

S.H.: I’ve heard from some veterans of the current war that sometimes they’re uncomfortable with the fact that it defines them. They are defined as veterans of the Iraq war. Did you find anything similar among WWII vets?

BURNS: Well no, I think that we’re dealing with this unbelievably powerful, healing, and merciless thing called time. That these guys came back from the Second World War, didn’t want to be defined by it, and basically shut up. We’re a non-therapeutic society, nobody really wants to know the answer to the question, ‘what did you do in the war Daddy, or son.’ They just don’t want to really know what happens: ‘well, I just turned around and my best friend, a guy I wish you could know – my very best friend in the world, I just watched his head get blown off.’ You can’t tell your mom you can’t tell your pop. You lock it away and you get on with life.

Towards the end of your life you begin to realize how much you were defined by that. That who you were, good and bad, and otherwise, is defined by an experience of war.

When Quentin Aanenson on the stage of the Lincoln Theater in Washington, D.C. a few weeks ago mentioned that with each “Star-Spangled Banner” [he heard], he went through the list of his close friends who died, he was in the presence of a Vietnam War veteran and an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran. When he finished, nearly in tears, the Iraq veteran turned to him and said, ‘Quentin, I feel like you are an echo of me, or I am an echo of you. That we are the same thing.’ It was as if it were the grandfather, the son, and the grandson that we had there.

[Part 1] [Part 3]

Interview: Ken Burns on WWII Vets [Part 1]

David Botti — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 14:06:33 GMT

Last month filmmaker Ken Burns debuted his seven-part World War II documentary on PBS, "The War," an epic chronicle of combat and home front experiences. I spoke with him this week at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism about working with veterans during the six years of production on the film. Today’s is the first post in a multi-part series. Excerpts:

S.H.: For The Veterans History Project you gave advice to regular people interviewing veterans in their own families. You talked about establishing a “comfort zone” for the interview. How did you do this with vets you interviewed for The War?

BURNS: What we look for at the essence of an interview is free exchange. We aren’t investigative journalists. We aren’t there with their tax returns for the last ten years grilling them. This dynamic is most critical when you’re interviewing veterans, because quite often you’re dealing with people who have, understandably, locked away horrific things that they’ve seen, and horrific things that they’ve done–and people they’ve had close to them that they’ve lost.

You have to be respectful and mindful of the fact that they may not get there. That they may not reveal that. And there’s no amount of trickery or cajolery worth it to try to do that.

So, what we look for is to film them in a comfortable situation. To do so in places where they feel comfortable, to be non-threatening, but to also pursue questions, and not just have a rigorous set of questions, so that you might miss following up on something that was quite meaningful.

A particular veteran [Quentin Aanenson] in our films said “I loved airplane flying when I was a kid, that’s where I want to go–that’s where I want to be sometime.” But if you watch his eye crinkles you know that’s not where he wanted to be. That what he saw when he eventually became a pilot was so horrible. And so we moved–we just tested him, and he gave up stuff his wife had never heard, his children had never heard before. Maybe I missed lots of stuff he would’ve told me.

I was with him in a public discussion a year after we finished the film, and he told us something he had never said on film: that he’s lived outside of Washington D.C. for the last 50 years, and every time he and his son went to a Washington Redskins football game, as he was singing "The Star-Spangled Banner," he went through all the friends that he lost in the war. He never told his son, never told anyone else, and as he began to tear up in an audience of his sons and all the other people, you began to realize that you were present once again at the very thing you hope to have, not just with veterans but with anybody.

Particularly with veterans because they are getting at the dynamic of combat and a war–the most exaggerated state that human beings get. Not something that’s distant, but something that’s present.

This is a guy who wakes up most every night from nightmares, from the Second World War, done for him for 60 years, with his hands in a palsy, in a shake because he’s remembering the time when he caught some Germans out in the open and was cutting human beings in half with his 50mm machine guns off his Thunderbolt [fighter plane].

He still has this. His wife always reads him as he comes into the kitchen, and will sometimes hand the cup of coffee to the other hand.

Sometimes I found with a veteran [Paul Fussell], a man who’s actually written about war, and is known as kind of a well-spoken and avuncular chronicler of the human experience of war–I found myself saying, 'I’m not interested in that.'

I’m interested in you as a 19-year-old lieutenant on the line whose average life expectancy was 17 days, and you didn’t take a shower, or brush your teeth, or change your clothes in six months. And you outlived those odds until you were severely wounded, and they moved you to the head of the line, and patched you up for the invasion of Japan which fortunately did not happen otherwise you would’ve gone mad.

I just said to him at some point early on “you saw bad things.” And the chin, almost like a little boy, started to quake. The eyes started to crinkle up, and for the next several reels of film he gave us priceless access to that 19-year-old–who is as present in his own memories as he is today at 80-years-old.

That’s what we were after in the film. It required a kind of direct unmediated contact with people and their now recently expressed, or just expressed, memories.

[Part 2] [Part 3]