I got to thinking about this the other day, after reading David Halbfinger's account in The New York Times of why Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers is tanking at the box office. When I saw it last weekend, maybe eight or nine others watched with me, and most of them grew up without television. But demographics—the passing of "The Greatest Generation"—explain only so much, according to Halbfinger. In the 1990s, when Tom Brokaw's book lionized the men and women who fought and survived World War II, and Steven Spielberg filmed his Normandy epic, Saving Private Ryan, a prosperous, post-Cold War United States warmed to tales of aging titans. When Band of Brothers, the HBO series from Spielberg and Ryan star Tom Hanks, debuted on September 9, 2001, World War II was already in the zeitgeist's rear view mirror, and subsequent history has distanced it further, says Halbfinger.
Something about this observation, though, depends on accepting these productions as "war movies," and their box office numbers as indices of a war's popularity. The unpopular war we endure today does not diminish the honor we accord those fighting it, and to suggest it taints earlier conflicts is a stretch. But Spielberg and Eastwood, co-producers of Flags of Our Fathers, have not made "war movies" so much as studies of behavior and moral challenges in war. Saving Private Ryan was about the central issue on many soldiers' minds: how expendable they were. That an entire squad perished to rescue one symbolic person drove home the point with irony's blunt edge.
Part of the mythology about World War II, shaped during the Vietnam years, was that it was the last "good war," as Studs Turkel titled it. This ignores the fact that the generation that fought it had no lofty illusions about it. As the literary scholar and combat veteran Paul Fussell has pointed out, soldiers had little clue why they were fighting, except that they must, in order to go back home. Fussell, in his splendid book Wartime, traces the military designation of "public information officer" to the Good War: "The postwar power of ‘the media' to determine what shall be embraced as reality is in large part due to the success of the morale culture in wartime. It represents, indeed, its continuation."
Flags of Our Fathers is about the public-relations machine that plucks two Marines and a Navy corpsman from Iwo Jima to pump up lagging war-bond sales, simply because they were in the famous photograph of Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi. But Eastwood is careful to season his cynicism. When the corpsman meets a dead comrade's mother, who desperately wants to believe her son is in the photo, he accommodates her—as the Treasury Department official shepherding the trio around the country reminds him when the corpsman complains about the falsity of their mission. The parallels with the Iraq war are obvious. It was sold to us through earnest lies by an administration which has raised public-relations chicanery to new levels of evil. Should we infer that this, too, is a "good" war, despite the propaganda that proclaimed it so?
Halbfinger, in his Times essay, observes that young people, knowing and caring little about earlier wars, rely on direct sources of information, such as blog and YouTube posts, about this one. But today's military, unlike that of "The Greatest Generation," is all-volunteer, and direct accounts of war could be colored by service members' admirable enthusiasm for their mission. Fussell also notes that World War II's conscripted warriors tended to "accentuate the positive" in letters home.
As we near an election likely to be a referendum on the Iraq war, it's worth noting that lies sometimes can be noble, and that some wars are necessary, if never "good." But we owe it to those fighting and dying on our behalf to salvage the truth from the machine gun nest.
Chuck Twardy has written for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. His website,
www.members.cox.net/theanteroom, has a forum.