A guy here in Northfield who reads my Joe to Gos wrote back about my Memorial Day weblog entry and invited me and another guy to watch one or more war movies at his house. Last night, we watched Gallipoli.
This time, I was struck by the comraderie that was all part of the chain of events leading up to the actual trench warfare scenes. The friendships, the glamor, the glory, the romance, the anticipatory excitement – a masterful seduction of young men. I can see how I would’ve gotten caught up in it had I been around during that time. But I don’t think I would’ve been capable of the “mindless personal courage” required, once the time came to charge the machine gunners… at least, not with my current pyschological makeup.
That phrase jumped out at me when I read this opinion piece in Time mag a couple weeks ago: Greatest Generation Or Unluckiest? The hoopla for the men who fought WW II cheapens what they accomplished, by Richard Schickel.
“The Greatest Generation? The superlative has the odor of heedless publicity. They were, surely, the Unluckiest Generation, emerging from Depression into total war without a break. They were, equally, the most dutiful generation. They may have lacked any sophisticated understanding of why they fought. But they stood when they were told to, advanced when they were ordered to and died because, at the time, they were the right age for the killing fields. They were basically democracy’s profoundly human champions and, yes, victims. As a beneficiary of their exertions, I’d somehow rather remember them in their griping imperfection than as the subjects of a fatuous slogan.”