Remembering Private Ryan: A Detail

WAR UNDER SCRUTINY By saving one hapless soldier

I WATCHED THAT OLD WAR film again last night, Saving Private Ryan. I couldn’t help it. War movies always fascinate me, even when I was a kid. I used to hear stories about Hitler or Tojo (and at one point from a war veteran), how they survived, how they managed to overcome such trials or atrocities from that bloody hell, and how it maims the soul of a person, which are quite prevalent in the film.

Saving Private Ryan came out almost two decades ago, and yet, those dying soldiers from the shores of Normandy still reverberates a foreboding tone every time I recall that scene. Like how the hell did that soldier find his arm after being blown off amid bullets and bombs on that hellish Omaha beach?

Anyway, the story centers on one Private James Ryan (Matt Damon) as he was searched by a squad of ragtag rangers led by Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks), even as the team faced a series of resistance on their way to Newville, where Ryan allegedly landed along with the other Airborne troops. The search came out after three of the four Ryan brothers were reportedly dead immediately after the Allies landed in Normandy. The mission: to get Ryan out of that shitty mess and to bring him home.

Of course, that is easier said than done. Ryan, however, did get home, but only after some internal squabbling from the squad, those intense fighting against that Wehrmacht offensive and with almost all of Miller’s crew killed, including the captain himself. Apparently, saving one soldier is as immediate as the resolution of that global conflict, knowing that a mother isn’t at all empty-handed in the end, after sending his boys to the bloody shores of Normandy and in the hellish jungles of New Guinea. Though it’s just a detail from that wholesale war, the issue, however, is as real as it gets.

I’m really not that religious, but the film reminds me of that distraught shepherd, who set out to find one missing sheep and leaving the rest at bay because finding that wayward animal is the essence of taking care of that herd. Yet, despite being labeled sententious and borderline implausible, Saving Private Ryan, nonetheless, is one of the few war flicks that I like, along with some of my personal favorites, All Quiet on the Western Front, Full Metal Jacket, Schindler’s List, and The Boy with a Stripped Pajamas.

The plot of the film puts the entire World War II drama in a microscope. You don’t have to see the panorama of any war for you to get the picture; you’ll just have to focus on a detail, and in this case, the saving of one beleaguered soldier, and the neutralization of that loss following the death of his brothers. Saving Private Ryan did just that. And watching the film somehow is like staring at that tiny spot from Picasso’s Guernica.   

photo: www.moviehousememories.com