You’re probably wondering what Inspirational music has to do with war movies.  I am too.

Lately, for whatever reason, I’ve found myself watching war movies.  I’m an inveterate channel surfer on the tube.  When I turn on the TV, which is not very often, I usually surf through the myriad of junk looking for something to watch and over the past couple of weeks I’ve found myself landing on the killing grounds.

Makes me wonder.  Why this fascination now?  What purpose does this all serve?  I am a pacifist.  I was a draft dodger during the Viet Nam war.  I have been basically against every war we’ve ever gotten into.  I think war is the ultimate idiocy.

Perhaps it’s the drama.  No greater stakes than life and death.  I watched Glory the other night.  Powerful!  I must have teared up, choked up, broken out in an audible wail 10 times in the course of the movie.  Looking back at the emotional experience, it was always about the overcoming of racism that affected me.  I found myself rooting for the black guys against the southern bigots with a passion that was startling.  And, of course, the racism regarding the northern bigots was worse.  At least they should have known better.

This company of men gave up their lives for their cause.  Extraordinary, when ya’ really think about it.  They gave up their lives for a cause.

Black Hawk Down was another.  Here men created a brotherhood which would not allow each other to be left behind – even when each other was a dead body.  A movie more about brotherhood than anything else.

Saving Private Ryan is another brotherhood movie.  Perhaps the ultimate.  Private Ryan is the only surviving brother in WWII in a family of five brothers all killed in the war.  Tom Hanks has to go save him.  He dies trying.

The landing at Omaha Beach on D-day is one of the most electrifyingly scary things I’ve ever seen in my life, but the moments before the final battle in the movie, as the burned-out town is quiet and the soldiers wait and then the German tanks begin to rumble in the distance is even scarier.

Man’s fascination with war.  I shake my head and wonder what’s wrong with me.

And then I watched Enemy At The Gates.  A story about a Russian sniper and a German sniper and their battle to outwit each other during the siege of Stalingrad during WWII.  The tension was, for me, equal to a 9^th inning dual between pitcher and batter in a Red Sox/Yankee nail biter.  I had seen it before and could not remember how it ended.  And, of course, with war movies, many of them do not have happy endings.  Come to think of it, are there any happy endings in war movies?  Probably not – other than sometimes the hero comes out alive.

But what a toll…

Lately, it’s more and more difficult to watch them.  Every time some guard or some gook or some Jerry or some Johnny Reb gets killed, I think to myself, “And that guy had a whole life.  He grew up as a child in Davenport and had a mom and a little sister.  He had hopes and dreams just like I do and now, poof, he’s dead and it’s just over…”

I know I’m not supposed to be thinking these things.  I’m supposed to be hanging with the story, but I keep getting stuck in the moment.  He was expendable.  After all, he was just a guard or a gook and didn’t even have a name in the movie!  This man with a whole life behind him and a whole life before him was nothing but a prop for some action moment.  So I keep getting stuck in these thoughts.

One of my favorites has always been The Bridge On The River Kwai, about a man determined to build a bridge for the enemy while interred in a Japanese prison camp.  In the end he has to blow up his own creation.  As a child, I whistled the movie’s theme for years.  The movie still captures me in its clutches and forces me to put the remote down.

The last scenes are brilliant in their stirrings of mixed emotions and confusion of minds.  To me, the bridge is the perfect metaphor for man’s world, built proudly and then destroyed in the name of victory.

Many of us are repulsed by the modern violence portrayed in the war scenes.  In my life there was a notable change in the violence portrayed in the movies after the Viet Nam war.  If you watch war movies made before the 70s, when someone was shot and killed, they grabbed their shirt and fell down.  They died, but they died clean, heroic, and with little bloodshed.

After Viet Nam, a different kind of war movie began to emerge – one where often the Americans actually lost, one where the hero dies being splattered all over the screen.

Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter and Platoon totally captured the true violence and horror of war.  People were shocked and horrified by this portrayal.  Why did they have to show such things?  Violence for violence’ sake.

But I was for it.  I felt for a long time that all high schools should have mandatory classes for teenage boys where they had to watch these movies along with Apocalypse Now and The Thin Red Line.  As children, especially boys, we grow up far too thrilled with the glory of war and can’t wait to go off to battle and come home victorious with metals pinned on our shirts.

These movies would balance the reality.  “Hey kid, watch this.  See what it’s really all about?  Here’s what life is really all about over there.”

The Sylvester Stallone war movies, where the gooks can’t shoot straight and are all expendable, are not what I’m talking about.  These are as bad as the 40s propaganda movies.

I don’t know.  It’s all a bit complicated for me.  When my son was three I did a little experiment.  I kept guns away from him and sheltered him from violent images.  One day his little three-year old next-door neighbor girlfriend was over for a play date.  I gave them each a pencil to draw with.

I watched in fascination as the little girl took the pencil and cradled it like a baby and comforted it.  My son, Dustin, took the pencil from me, watched her for a second or two and then put the pencil in his hand in such a way that it became a gun.  He then shot me with it.

I thought, “Wow, it’s in his genes!”  As mortal men are we pre-programmed for war?  I don’t know, but if we are, we seriously need to reboot, clean out our hard drives and repair our permissions.

War is just an excuse for killing people legally and getting away with it.  What total folly.  Perhaps I need to think a bit deeper on all this.

For more inspirational music, thoughts and ideas from Peter Link,
please visit Watchfire Music.