The Bell Curve -- Joseph N. Bell

Two close friends of many years -- Richard and Lee Thomas -- spent

last weekend with us. Although they live in Portland, Ore., and we see

them probably once a year, we picked up our talk instantly, as one does

with old friends. And on this visit, it took an unexpected turn.

My wife and I had just seen a movie called “Hart’s War” that we

thought vaguely paralleled Richard’s experience in World War II. We knew

only that he had been wounded in the Battle of the Bulge and ended the

war in a German prison camp; we had never questioned him about the

details. Last weekend we did -- not only because of “Hart’s War” but also

because we’re acutely aware of a whole spate of war movies now playing in

our theaters.

The story we heard was harrowing. Richard was 17 years old when he

enlisted in the Army and 18 when he was called in 1944. He had nine

months of infantry training in the States before he was shipped over to

France, where the Allies were inexorably pushing the Germans back into

their homeland. When his company was moved into Belgium two weeks before

Christmas, the men they replaced told the newcomers they were lucky. The

heavy fighting was over; the Germans were in full retreat.

On the night of Dec. 15, Richard’s unit members went to sleep at their

positions still embracing those reassurances. They were awakened a few

hours later by a devastating artillery barrage followed by an

overpowering wave of German troops. Richard was in charge of a machine

gun squad that included four other green soldiers. Six times they pulled

back, set up a new position, and pulled back again. The sixth time, an

artillery burst just behind them poured shrapnel into their midst.

Richard and two others were hit in the legs.

As the wounded lay immobile, they were overrun. Richard remembers in

graphic detail three German soldiers standing over them, staring down and

debating what to do. One of the Germans said in English: “The war is over

for you.” Richard was, he told us, beyond fear by this time. His life was

spared because this was early in the battle when the Germans were still

taking prisoners. Richard and one of his companions were taken to a

German hospital, then to a prisoner-of-war camp. He learned later that

his severely wounded gunner was later euthanized at a mobile hospital.

Richard tells all this matter-of-factly. He talks about fear the same

way: a teenager facing death in his seven-day war, so shaken by the

events of the night that finally fear becomes a kind of blessed numbness.

He simply doesn’t think about it while he does his job as he was trained.

Those of us involved in the same war who never had to face the

battlefield terrors of an infantryman have often wondered how we might

have dealt with them.

This same question has recurred to me while watching the increasing

tide of war movies -- both in our theaters and on television -- since the

publication of “The Greatest Generation” and the release of “Saving

Private Ryan.” Only recently have I become aware that most members of

this new generation of war films offer a basic difference in tone from

their predecessors.

“Black Hawk Down” and “We Were Soldiers” are the best examples. There

are no laggards, malcontents, racists or political debates here. Both of

these films are fulsome tributes to the grunts, the fighting men who

accepted and performed their duties with strength, selfless courage and

honor. Richard Thomas would have been seen the same way. But this point

is brought home by technical brilliance with such relentless, graphic and

bloody depiction of the horrors of combat against a determined and

resourceful enemy that these films carry a stronger antiwar message by

implication than earlier films did by design.

“We Were Soldiers,” for example, opens with a scene of the French

army, exhausted after 10 years of warfare against a Vietnamese army

seeking freedom from colonial France, giving up the fight to go home. We

have to fill in the lesson (it would help to read Robert McNamara’s mea

culpa “In Retrospect”) that it took us almost as long to reach the same

conclusion.

The film ends with with a Viet Cong colonel surveying the dead on a

battlefield and saying: “Now it is the Americans’ war. But the end will

be the same.” In between these bookends of futility, we watch American

soldiers face the daily reality of fighting a determined people who are

defending their own turf. In “We Were Soldiers,” that turf was Vietnam.

In “Black Hawk Down,” it was Somalia. The turf differed. The courage of

the men and the body bags didn’t.

I don’t know if the people who made these films saw them as a protest

against war, but they should be required viewing for the suits in

Washington while they consider using the “war on terrorism” as a

rationale for expanding our military commitment beyond Afghanistan.

That’s when things start to get murky. At least Richard Thomas knew what

he was fighting for. That should be a prerequisite for sending any more

Americans into battle.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.