Reviews of Spielberg’s movie, Saving Private Ryan, generally praise this haunting look at the horror and heroism of war in general, and World War II in particular.

Good movies entertain us; great movies change our way of thinking.

Saving Private Ryan is a great movie. No one viewing it will ever be quite the same afterward—nor should they be. For a nation who watched the war in Vietnam on the evening news while eating their evening meal, or who saw destruction at arm’s length on CNN during the Gulf War, we have grown accustomed to the seemingly sanitized nature of death in the distance. Whether it’s John Wayne on Iwo Jima or the Republican Guard on CNN, if someone dies on the screen in our living room, it’s not real; it’s somewhere “over there.”

Now, for perhaps the first time in movie history, those who have never been to war can see it and be terrified by it. And—perhaps for the last time—we have a slowly closing doorway of opportunity for open dialog about the war, and what it meant to those who fought it.

This movie provides an opening to an often overlooked source of family information: the oral history. What better way to find out about World War II and its impact on individual lives, than to ask someone who was there? Events today’s students call “History” were called “Current Events” only two generations ago.

In the 1990s, much of the movie-going public is between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. In movie theaters across America, young men are watching Private Ryan on a giant screen; fifty years ago young men were Private Ryans.

My father and five uncles went to war between 1941 and 1945. Your father or grandfather, that distant uncle, the old cousin with the cane at the family reunion—all of them have stories about the war. For many of them, that story is buried under the weight of more than fifty years. For too many of our relatives, sad memories or tragic experiences have remained too long unexpressed. Why? Maybe, as this film suggests, they believe those who weren’t there can never really understand.

Early in the film we are told that Private Ryan is the sole survivor of four brothers from Iowa who served in the war, originally in the same company, but were “split up after the Sullivans were killed.” Private Ryan is a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne who is dropped behind enemy lines on the eve of D-day. Unbeknownst to him, two of his brothers are killed on June 6, one at Utah Beach and the other at Omaha Beach, while the death of the third occurred while fighting in New Guinea a week earlier. Eight men who survived the harrowing gauntlet of Omaha Beach set out through enemy territory, in search of the one surviving brother.

Although a work of fiction from beginning to end, actual events color every frame of the movie. It is a work of fiction that has been hammered on the anvil of truth.

The screenplay written by Robert Rodat grew from a trip to New Hampshire when he visited a memorial to an earlier war and noted the recurrence of several surnames among the list of the honored dead.

The opening scene of the film, depicting an elderly veteran visiting the American cemetery at Normandy is similar to an event witnessed by Steven Spielberg on a visit to that cemetery when he was in Europe in 1972 promoting his film Duel.

In his book, Band of Brothers, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992) Stephen E. Ambrose includes the history of a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne, Fritz Niland, in France shortly after the invasion of Normandy. One day after learning that one of his brothers, a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne, had been killed on D-day, he learned that another brother had been killed on Utah Beach on D-Day. When Fritz returned to his own unit, he was informed that a third brother had been killed a week earlier in the China-Burma-India war zone. As the sole surviving son, Fritz Niland was sent home.

As mentioned earlier, the Ryan brothers of the movie were split up after the death of the Sullivan brothers. Today’s baby boomers and generation-x’ers, of course, may not have heard of the Sullivans; but they were very real.

On January 2, 1942, the five Sullivan brothers from Waterloo, Iowa—George, Francis, Joseph, Madison, and Albert—joined the Navy, with the hopes that they be allowed to serve together. A friend of theirs had been killed on the U.S.S. Arizona on December 7, 1941. They trained together at the Great Lakes Training Center, near Chicago, and were assigned to the cruiser, U.S.S. Juneau. Only a few months later, the Juneau was sunk by a Japanese submarine on November 13, 1942 during the Battle of the Solomons. Of the 676 men on board, only 11 survived; all five Sullivans were among the dead. Their parents received a personal letter from President Roosevelt which states, in part:

The Navy Department has informed me of the expressed desire of your sons, George Thomas, Francis Henry, Joseph Eugene, Madison Abel, and Albert Leo, to serve in the same ship. I am sure that we all take heart in the knowledge that they fought side by side. As one of your sons wrote, “We will make a team together that can’t be beat.” It is this spirit which in the end must triumph….

I send you my deepest sympathy in your hour of trial and pray that in the Almighty God you will find the comfort and help that only He can bring.

As evidenced by the screenwriter Rodat’s experience in New Hampshire, this was not the first instance of multiple family casualties in war. One of the more famous incidents occurred during the Civil War when President Lincoln wrote a letter to a Mrs. Bixby, who had lost several sons in the conflict. He states:

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts, that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.

I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.

Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,

Abraham Lincoln

In the opening battle scene of the movie, the invasion of Normandy is viewed through the eyes of a single company of the 2nd Ranger Battalion. We see death at it rawest as bodies stack up on the beach and the sands run red with the blood of the dead and dying. In the more than fifty years since the actual event, many of us may have forgotten that this slaughter of brave soldiers was only too real.

The facts are chilling. The first wave to hit the sector of Omaha Beach, Dog Green sector, was Company A of the 116th Regiment of Infantry. The 2nd Rangers were next. The 116th company suffered 90 percent casualties. Few survived and nearly all of those were wounded.

The movie suggests that sharing the life and death moments of daily survival creates a bond of brotherhood not understood by those of us who have never experienced war. In the film, when the eight soldiers find Private Ryan, he doesn’t want to be saved. “What do we tell your mother?” he is asked.

“Tell her that when you found me I was here,” he says. “That I was here with the only brothers I have left. That I wouldn’t desert them. I think she’ll understand that.”

How many of our own families have similar stories? Most of us have no idea of the bonds that tied our family veterans to their comrades-in-arms.

Stephen E. Ambrose’s book, Band of Brothers, is a history of one company of the 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, and the real life counterparts upon which the character of Private Ryan is based. Ambrose’s account of their war record illuminates this concept of brotherhood;

The result of these shared experiences was a closeness unknown to all outsiders. Comrades are closer than friends, closer than brothers… Their trust in, and knowledge of, each other is total….This sharing…evolved never to be relinquished, never to be repeated….They would literally insist upon going hungry for one another, freezing for one another, dying for one another.

Saving Private Ryan begs the question: do we need another reminder of the horrors of war? If so, why should we subject ourselves to such a realistic war experience from a movie? Here’s a simple answer: so we don’t forget. So we never forget. In the words of George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I had a brother-in-law—married to one of my wife’s sisters—who died three years ago. He was one of the kindest, most caring human beings I have ever known. During the Korean War, he was a genuine war hero. He was a fighter-pilot with the Air Force, credited with shooting down several enemy planes, and he was also shot down. Although he did not die until recently, the cause of his death was tied to injuries he suffered in combat more than forty years ago. Sadly, most of this information I found out after his death. But how much richer is my memory of this man because of his personal imprint on the face of war. Stephen Hunter, a staff writer for the Washington Post, recently wrote:

And [the movie] works out. If Hanks’s Ranger unit hadn’t shown up when it did, clearly the bridge would have fallen into German hands and the beach breakout… would have been postponed for several hours, days, or even weeks. Hundreds, maybe thousands, more men would have died… But none of that happened, and it all stems from six tired and inarticulate men following an order they didn’t agree with and ending up on a little bridge in a French town. That’s what [Spielberg is] dramatizing—how the West was won, how civilization was saved, and has been time and time again, by little squads of witless men at bridges who had nothing to offer but their lives: Ask the Persians at Thermopylae—they learned that lesson the hard way.

More telling of the movie’s impact, perhaps, is its effects on the paying public.

As a 17-year-old, I find the thought of war particularly harrowing, since I and my peers would be eligible for the draft if war were to break out…. At the end, when the old man is looking at the grave of one of his comrades, his wife walks up to him…. When I saw those two people, I gasped, because I realized that the two of them were on opposite sides of the spectrum of experience—to the woman, the cross was simply the life of her husband; he was what mattered to her. But to the man, the cross was everything the war had been—the terrible fighting, the killing, the sacrifice that the man in the ground beneath him had given for him.

Alan Rosinus; Oakland, California

The most touching part of the film for me, was looking to my right and seeing an elderly man in his dress uniform watching the movie...proudly at times, sobbing at others…while his wife held his hand tightly. The movie touched HIM. He, other vets like him, and those that died, have gone unappreciated for far too long.

Scott Free, New Jersey

One of my uncles, now deceased, fought at Kassarine Pass in Tunisia when General Rommel and his German Panzers decimated the American forces. He didn’t like to talk about his experiences. My own father was a waist gunner on a B-17, stationed in England and shot at over occupied Europe. Over the years, when I asked him about his experiences, he responded that he had forgotten. To this day, the only things I know about him in the war are that he came back wounded less than a month before D-Day, recovered, and spent the rest of the war as a gunnery instructor, stateside.

My uncles and my dad—and the other survivors of World War II, Korea and Vietnam that I have known—have a few important things in common. They were shot at. People tried to kill them. When asked about the war, they don’t want to talk about it. This movie puts into words some of the things they have been unable to say. In a speech made by Tom Hanks in the character of Captain John Miller, the leader of the mission, he says: “I’ve changed. I don’t know if my wife will recognize me. And I don’t know how I’m ever going to explain to her what’s happened to me here—or days like today.”

These words are echoed in reports from real veterans, as evidenced in a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, written by Amy Wallace. She interviewed Dick Winters who is the central figure of the book, Band of Brothers.

Winters, who was with the 101st Airborne on D-day, received the Distinguished Service Cross for knocking out German cannons at Utah Beach. The 80-year-old resident of Hershey, Pa., said “Saving Private Ryan” has helped him by making him feel that now, finally, non-veterans can begin to understand. “It’s hard to talk to someone who wasn’t there. It’s not just the memories. They don’t know what questions to ask,” [he] said.

And that is precisely the movie’s value. As José Narosky once wrote, “In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.”

For those of us who weren’t there, Saving Private Ryan helps us understand why the survivors of war don’t want to talk about it—why they want to forget. The greatest tragedy of war may not be so much with those who die in the conflict, but with those who come home with so much that is dead inside them. The greatness of the movie may not be its portrayal of the inhumanity of war, but its reminder of the humanity that survives among those who are forced to fight in them.

We now have a reminder of how much we owe the men who fought in that great war, and why—when they are gone—the rest of us must always, always remember.

Ron Eggertsen, a freelance writer, served in the United States Navy on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific 1956–1963.

See also The Internet's Best World War II Links and Resources.