That seems to be the motto for surviving the emotional and mental Hell that the marines went through throughout the war in the Pacific. They had to focus on the next day, the next moment, not the one that had just passed. Otherwise, they would be stuck, frozen in that awful second, and be of no use to anyone, including themselves.
Yet, how can you go on as your heroes die around you? Until now, men have died, but it just didn't seem as horrible. I guess we hadn't got to know them, hadn't really grown to appreciate and value their worth. They were just characters in a TV series about war - necessary because men died, but not evoking the pain felt if those men were real.
In Part 7, that changed. First Eddie (Leon Ford), who was quite a hero in Part 6, gets shot. Sledge (Joe Mazzello) is sent with a stretcher to get him, but even as they load him up, he's not looking well. Then all of them were peppered with bullets, and Eddie's chances disappeared. And as if the horror of that death, and the almost ridiculousness of running a stretcher in to try to save men - more likely the two stretcher bearers were going to join the list of casualties than save anyone - wasn't enough, another painful death soon followed.
Known as Ack Ack or the Skipper by his men, Captain Andrew Haldane (Scott Gibson) not only proved himself a great leader by winning the respect of his men, but he was also a good man. His conversation early in the episode with Sledge about his father only made a man we already valued into one we truly liked. And for him, so brave, so clever, so wonderful, to die off screen, taken out by a sniper, was fittingly awful. Normally, I would complain that so important a character was killed off screen, but the scene worked so much better this way. One moment, he was alive and leading his men, the next, we were told he was dead.
It was impossible to believe. How could he have been killed so easily, so quickly, so pointlessly? A man like Haldane should have gone down in a blaze of glory, taking out a hundred of the enemy. Instead, his body was simply removed, wrapped in a blanket his father might have made, and his men had to summon the courage to go on without him.
The deaths were hard on the men's moral, but even worse is the dehumanization. The Japanese soldiers weren't men, could not be viewed as men. They were a vile enemy, one which had to be stopped at any cost. And considering the cost of stopping them, how could any other view be taken?
Today, our culture has such a fascination with Japan. We have sushi places all over the place, Manga takes up more room on the shelves than Marvel and DC comics, and Anime are considered better kids shows than most of what North America produces. It's so hard to reconcile that love with the hatred that these soldiers, now grandparents, held for the same people.
I am horrified by the truths presented to me every time I watch an episode of this series, and yet I am grateful to be shown these horrors, to have the opportunity of appreciating what this war was like.
No comments:
Post a Comment