GUEST COLUMNIST: We few, we band of brothers

I didn't intend to write this column. I planned to write about baseball and building new ballparks. But a movie induced me to change my mind. And after you've seen Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, you'll understand why baseball seemed so completely trivial to me. As a diplomatic history major and World War II buff who spends more than a couple hours a week watching war documentaries on the History Channel, I waited eagerly for Saving Private Ryan to hit the big screen ever since I heard about it three months ago. Tom Hanks, who stars as Capt. John Miller, touted the movie as the most realistic film within the war genre. Curiously, he said he believed that the harrowing Saving Private Ryan, a war movie, included no gratuitous violence -- leading me to realize that this movie would not be easy to stomach. Last summer, I traveled to France's Normandy for 10 days, and I had the chance to see the beaches where Allied forces mounted a cross-channel invasion into Nazi-occupied Europe on D-Day -- June 6, 1944. Besides visiting Caen's wonderful World War II museum and touring a German radar complex at Douvres, I walked on each of the five beaches and tried to imagine how a soldier could gather the necessary courage to run toward the towering English Channel cliffs while facing an endless barrage of submachinegun fire, grenades and mortar shells. At Utah Beach, one of the beaches where American troops landed, the sky threatened rain and the sand was damp from sea spray. Starting from the war memorial on the high dunes, I walked toward the water until the waves touched my shoes. Then I turned around and ran. I ran as fast as I could from the sea. Making zig-zag motions through the soggy sand, I imagined that I was an American soldier on D-Day trying mightily to elude the German bullet that would elicit a heartbreaking letter from the Secretary of War to my anxious parents at home. Earlier that afternoon, I moved through the infinite rows of marble-white gravestones at the American war cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach, where the United States's 29th and 1st Divisions once stormed ashore. Mere children were among the immortalized dead -- 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds, 20-year-olds. They were my age when they lost their lives. They never had a chance, and that fact alone killed me inside. Shortly after, I advanced past Omaha Beach to Pointe-du-Hoc. Here on D-Day, Army Rangers from the 86th Infantry of the 1st Division valiantly took the key strategic location. With heavy mortars, American forces took out massive German pillboxes and left enormous craters in the surrounding ground. With four medieval churches in my line of sight, the scene took on an even more surreal quality. Having seen the destructive results of the invasion firsthand, I still wasn't prepared for the emotional challenge of watching Saving Private Ryan. No matter how much history I had studied, I never could have been prepared. Only the surviving soldiers would understand. The film opens as a veteran collapses in tears at the American war cemetery. We soon discover why. Before long, the setting shifts to Omaha Beach for a 30-minute, flawless re-creation of the 2nd Ranger Battalion's debarkation and struggle up the cliffs on D-Day. Through handheld cameras, impeccable special effects and superb, concise dialogue, I was transported more than 50 years into the past to Normandy. The machine guns pound incessantly, and Nazi snipers pick off vulnerable American soldiers in horrifying fashion. I felt closer to the war than I did when I was on Omaha Beach itself. Led by Hanks' Capt. Miller, the group suffers tremendous casualties, only to be sent on a perilous and questionable mission on orders from Gen. George Marshall himself. The soldiers must find and send home a Pvt. James Francis Ryan, a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division who not only missed his drop spot by 20 miles, but who also lost his three brothers in combat. Saving Private Ryan follows the group on their trek through Normandy's bocage country, as they search for the proverbial needle in a haystack. More important, they must deal with the countless moral ambiguities of war. How does a soldier justify killing another man? Does killing one enemy soldier really prevent 10 of your own men from being killed? Should you kill a surrendered enemy soldier because he is the enemy and because he tried to kill you? Even in war, when is it morally acceptable to kill? In one memorable scene, Miller's squad captures a Nazi gunner who has killed a member of their troop. A near fatal argument ensues over whether or not to let this man go, for he is the enemy, but he is also a man. After the movie, I felt ashamed. Ashamed because I never fully realized the nature of the ordeal these men experienced. As I leafed through my photographs from Normandy, I came across three that made me disgusted with myself. In one, I stood on Sword Beach, John Keegan's The Second World War in hand, ever looking the aloof historian. In another, I peered out a sniper hole at the Nazi radar station. In the last, I sat at the bottom of a crater at Pointe-du-Hoc, smiling in the French sun. I was so ignorant. Saving Private Ryan is the finest war movie ever made -- the film equivalent of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. With its graphic ultra-realism, deep character development and touching depiction of interpersonal relationships, Saving Private Ryan trumps more recent top-notch war history entries like Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, Glory, Braveheart, Platoon, Das Boot, Breaker Morant and Patton. It steals the D-Day film crown outright from The Longest Day and the overall war title from the legendary The Bridge on the River Kwai. Too often, Americans focus on the glory of winning a just war without truly understanding the horror its participants experienced. Saving Private Ryan bombards you with the message that war is hell.

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