Saw the movie this weekend, went by myself. The Hobbit was up north with the Kat, celebrating regional championships at Six Flags, and the Biscuit was trying out for the girls’ rugby team, of all things.
I knew it wasn’t going to be a Sunday afternoon “feel good,” but I’ve gained a appreciation for Clint Eastwood’s skills as a director that Flags of Our Fathers does nothing to dilute. The story of the three young men – two Marines and their Navy corpsman – ripped from their comrades’ sides and the butchery of a Pacific combat zone and thrust into the national spotlight to stiffen a buckling national spine is not a new one, but the tale is woven seamlessly here.
It’s a brilliantly executed film from a technical standpoint – the balletic complexities of amphibious warfare have never been drawn so vividly, for example, and the battle scenes at Iwo Jima – a ground I have trod myself, gaining new respect along the way for the men who had to fight there – are as realistic as any art done on the subject of warfare. The transcendent splendors of personal heroism are illuminated as are the vivid horrors of random, anonymous, indiscriminate slaughter. So too are the vagaries of chance, the impermanence of fame, how quickly truth is sacrificed on the altar of necessity and what personal consequences obtain when young men who have already borne too much are further burdened with the hopes and fears of a war-wearied country.
The tale’s protagonists are average men who have been a part of extraordinary events, and chosen almost at random to be heroes, asked to stand in the stead of their fallen comrades – they believe none of it themselves, but are eventually led – some might say manipulated – to see their work as another kind of national service. In their fresh young faces we see fear, indecision and ultimately courage. We recognize in their youth the people we knew only as elders, the ones that built this land for us, who indeed built this world for us and deeded over to us in stewardship and trust.
The movie moves at the director’s pace, and Eastwood will not be rushed – his body of work will never be mistaken for a Run Lola, Run or The Fast and the Furious. This is no quick-turning MTV slide show set to explosions and rock music – the viewer is expected to bring an adult attention span. While unhurried, it never quite feels long though, and you never have a moment where you say to yourself, “I can just step outside and not miss anything.”
Because most of all Eastwood wants you to see it all, to be a part of it, to touch and taste it, to understand the warriors and the citizens and the times they lived in. He wants you to see the burnished steel sleeper trains moving the three veterans across the country. He wants you to understand how a war was financed when the dollar was still a hard currency linked to gold reserves, and deficits – “printing money” – were still an undiscovered innovation. He wants you to understand, without preachily rubbing your nose in it, what it meant to be a Native American war hero in a dominant society accustomed to its racial distinctions.
And it all works. You find yourself immersed in a a time that you know you only just barely missed experiencing for yourself, whose echoes you heard, a time that was bright and vivid and real and shockingly ephemeral – this was your parent’s youth and a entirely different country, pre-interstate, pre-jetliner, pre-every convenience we now take so thoroughly for granted.
Which for me anyway was the most compelling thing. The movie has been out for weeks, it’s nearing the end of its first run and among the audience that I shared theater with were at least a half-dozen very elderly couples from that Greatest Generation, some of them mere wisps seemingly prepared to vanish before your eyes so frail did they appear. This part of the audience did more than bear witness to a tale, they were transported by the director back into their own youth. They were brought face to face again with the glories and grittiness of the world they once knew, saw again the comaraderie and horror of a war they fought, an epic clash which cost all of them so much and which cost the ones that didn’t make it back everything. And although Eastwood graciously spares us the usual thick ladles of bathos that might accompany such a spectacle, even so by the end of the movie many of these people in the audience were openly weeping, the women shaking in their seats remembering all the faces that didn’t come home, while their normally-granite faced men sat beside them immobile, weak-kneed, unwilling to move until the moment had passed. Until they had recovered some remainder of the strength that had built a nation.
A part of me wanted to ask them what it was that they lamented, these ancients – their lost friends, the lost years, their own lost youth? But I didn’t want to intrude upon them and I don’t know if they could have answered me. All of it perhaps.
Not much longer now, and they will be lost to us too.
When I say the movie I sat next to an elderly couple. Asked by his wife if he ever landed on Iwo Jima the elderly man responded: “That island saved my life nine times.”
I want to see it before it leave the theaters, just to people watch like you and Mike did, and to get the full theater experience of the movie. But… I don’t want to go alone. Some tears are best shared.
Truly an entirely different country then, moving to an undiscovered country of choices they could barely imagine.
Our future cost their present, and for many, the dreams we take for granted.
Those who waited at home suffered as much, in their way, as those in combat. There are no historians for stories of futures that never came to be.
Maybe that’s what novels, and movies like this, are for.
I saw the movie “The Outsider”, with Tony Curtis as Ira Hayes, probably before you folks here were born. Of course, it won’t compare to “Flags of Our Fathers”, but it has stuck in my head as one of the saddest stories I ever heard.
Happily, we have evolved, and the “race war” seems to have been put to rest in the Service. Hopefully the recognition of the contributions of the likes of the Tuskeegee Airmen, the Marine Navajo Windtalkers (and the Army Cherokee Codetalkers), and the Mumford Point Marines have made some small restitution to previous generations.
I am troubled, however, at the stories of battlefield heroes who were taken from their buddies, and thrust into some PR drive, an element that they were so unprepared to deal with. To a man, the war-fighters claimed that they would rather face combat than to be paraded around before an adoring public. I understand the need for the public to meet these heroes, but still…
Kudos to Mr. Eastman for bringing their story to light.
I spent this morning out at the Minneapolis VA medical center with my dad. I’ve spent a lot of time out there with him over the last year. Most of the men I see out there are Korean and Vietnam vets. There are still a few WW2 vets out there but we’re loosing them pretty fast. In not too many years they’ll all be gone.
My dad is among the last. He joined the Army Air Corps in December 1943, a month after his 18th birthday. One year later he was a POW in Germany. He was shot down on his first mission in a plane that was also on its first mission. He was a tail gunner on a B17. His plane was hit by AAA at 27,000 ft and blew apart. He says that he remembers the explosion and then nothing else until he was pulled from the wreckage of the tail section four hours later by some German soldiers.
He endured a lot during his five months as a POW including a 500 mile forced march in the winter with just a regular uniform and a single wool blanket. They were on the road to avoid being captured by the advancing Russian army.
My Dad was interviewed by Don Ward, the author of the book Silver Wings which is a collection of stories of the men of the 8th Air Force in WW2. At the end of the interview my dad concluded, “As for my unique experience, I thought that nothing could ever be worse… and to this day, nothing ever was, and I am thankful that I was able to serve and to have survived the unsurvivable.”
My Mom’s brother was an 18 year old Marine in the 4th Marine Division on Iwo. I spoke with him about it a long time ago and he told me a little, as much as I thought to ask back as a pre-pubescent boy. Wished I had re-engaged him after maturing. He was severely wounded on D+10 vicinity of the 2nd airfield. He was with five other Marines carrying a wounded buddy on a stretcher back and he was carrying all their weapons when a mortar round landed in their midst killing everyone else. One of the weapons was a Thompson and it apparently went off when he was blown off his feet. He took a .45 round thru his back and out his left pec and one in the small of his back injuring his spine. Another went down his leg and exited out his behind his left knee. I remember this because he showed me the scars. That and he was full of mortar fragments. A Marine named White saved him and dragged him to the aid station. As I understand it, White was killed before the end of the battle. My uncle was hospitalized for over a year and spent the rest of his life with metal braces on his legs. After seeing “Flags” it made me think about this all over again. I wished I had spent more time with him when he was alive. I know a few of today’s heros but my uncle, yeah, he definitely was a hero in every sense of the word. Any Marine who did his duty on THAT Island was. Wish I could tell him now. You listening Unc?
GreyEagleO6
Grey, he’s listening.
The past isn’t even past, as long as we remember.
My father-in-law was a flight engineer on a B29 operating from Tinian. Before Iwo was taken, his plane had to ditch in the Pacific. Only he and one other crewman survived. After the Marines took Iwo, his plane made another forced landing, this time on one of the island’s airstrips. Everyone survived. When the new Air Force Memorial in Arlington was being planned, he remarked to me that as far as he was concerned, the Air Force didn’t need another memorial — the one down the hill (the Iwo Jima Memorial) was good enough for him.
The stories you are all telling are fascinating bits of history. Lex, I think an appropriate Veteran’s Day post would be an open post for people like Dale and Geo to tell their stories.