S.H.: One of the veterans said something in the film that really struck me. He said, “you don’t expect death among people your own age.”
BURNS: Yes, that was Sam Hynes who is professor emeritus of literature from Princeton University. Sam got it very very well. What happens is that young men do the fighting because they’re the ones who particularly have a sense of their own immortality, their own invincibility. That’s why most car accidents are teenagers, 17 or 18-years-old, who think they can drive as fast as they want and [then] can’t make that turn. And we read the tragedies almost daily in our newspapers.
We actually enlist young men to do the fighting and the dying, because they have that willingness to do the stuff that we just look back and say I can’t believe he’d do that. I think [Sam] began to understand that moment that other soldiers described of arriving going, ‘I have no fear, but when the fighting started, yikes, what have I gotten into.’
Here is this notion that as the war began to grind on in the first year, and the casualties mounted, that this was a real thing. Only old people, he said, die. But, suddenly people your own age were dying and it wasn’t too far a leap to realize that you too may die. And then all of the sudden that limitlessness that we feel, however myopically, that we’re going to live forever is suddenly very really ripped from you. And war becomes a wholly different thing. ‘Yes I could die. We’re all gonna die. But it’s gonna to happen to grandpa and great-grandpa, it’s not gonna happen to me.’
This is a huge metaphysical calculus that we couldn’t possibly really truly understand, and we hope by approaching war to get a sense, get a glimmer of what it’s like.
S.H.: I’ve heard from some veterans of the current war that sometimes they’re uncomfortable with the fact that it defines them. They are defined as veterans of the Iraq war. Did you find anything similar among WWII vets? BURNS: Well no, I think that we’re dealing with this unbelievably powerful, healing, and merciless thing called time. That these guys came back from the Second World War, didn’t want to be defined by it, and basically shut up. We’re a non-therapeutic society, nobody really wants to know the answer to the question, ‘what did you do in the war Daddy, or son.’ They just don’t want to really know what happens: ‘well, I just turned around and my best friend, a guy I wish you could know – my very best friend in the world, I just watched his head get blown off.’ You can’t tell your mom you can’t tell your pop. You lock it away and you get on with life.
Towards the end of your life you begin to realize how much you were defined by that. That who you were, good and bad, and otherwise, is defined by an experience of war.
When Quentin Aanenson on the stage of the Lincoln Theater in Washington, D.C. a few weeks ago mentioned that with each “Star-Spangled Banner” [he heard], he went through the list of his close friends who died, he was in the presence of a Vietnam War veteran and an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran. When he finished, nearly in tears, the Iraq veteran turned to him and said, ‘Quentin, I feel like you are an echo of me, or I am an echo of you. That we are the same thing.’ It was as if it were the grandfather, the son, and the grandson that we had there.
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