CORRESPONDENCE
Correspondence DEFENDING PRIVATE RYAN I hope that your readers will not allow themselves to be guided by John Podhoretz's patronizing review of Saving Private Ryan, for it is one of the most...
...Of the opening D-Day scene, he says, "There's no single shot in this sequence to compare with the image of thousands of dead and dying Southern soldiers lying on the Atlanta railroad tracks in Gone with the Wind...
...If anything, in the movie it seems as though too many men survived...
...In no way does Spielberg exalt World War II, but he does exalt the soldiers who readily laid down their lives for the greater good in a truly just war...
...MICHAEL PLATT EAST WALLINGFORD, VT...
...I agree with Podhoretz that Spielberg can certainly be seen as holding many ridiculous beliefs, being a programmatic liberal, and possibly not even being an adult, but to suggest that the director has "an inability to grasp these ideas" and that "it was triumph that gave meaning to tragedy" is ridiculous...
...Most men who serve in the infantry remember even their closest friends only by their last names...
...Podhoretz also faults Steven Spielberg's development of characters because the moviegoer cannot remember their names...
...Podhoretz laments the movie's lack of glory...
...Perhaps those of us who have a hawkishly patriotic disposition in politics should, most of all, submit to this movie's terrors, which, though fictional, are vivid enough to elicit tears and sleepless nights...
...ELIOT COHEN WASHINGTON, DC John Podhoretz suggests that Saving Private Ryan "offers no coherent answers," but he is wrong because it enshrines the virtues of bravery and fortitude like no other recent movie...
...They are the more heroic for the unsparing portrayal of what they did, and what they endured...
...It is one thing to type William Tecumseh Sherman's phrase into a computer, turning a grim warrior's distillation of reality into a glib dismissal of it...
...Correspondence DEFENDING PRIVATE RYAN I hope that your readers will not allow themselves to be guided by John Podhoretz's patronizing review of Saving Private Ryan, for it is one of the most powerful movies about war ever made ("All Guts, No Glory," Aug...
...In terms of numbers, true enough, but Dog Green Beach was a small area, perhaps 20 percent of Omaha Beach alone...
...The Declaration has four references to God: as the Creator, legislator, judge, and providential executive (as George Anastaplo first observed...
...It is another to ponder that hell, to the extent that we comfortable civilians can...
...and the 29th Infantry Division (116th Infantry Regiment), I would call this reality...
...With my limited experience in both the 82nd Airborne (505 PI.R...
...The complaint that there is nothing new in the fact that "war is hell" is similarly misplaced...
...One wonders if someday, observing our dwindling protection of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, He might withdraw His covenanted protection...
...Infantry combat, unfortunately, exhibits the same deficiency...
...CHRISTOPHER C. CARON ARLINGTON, VA GOD AND THE DECLARATION Matthew Spalding's survey of religion's place in the American founding, itself a recommendation of the exhibit at the Library of Congress, would be completed by the mention of the Declaration of Independence ("Present at the Creation," Aug...
...So the movie remains historically exact in showing the landing of C Company's 2nd Ranger troop transport there...
...Thirty-five men in that 65-man Ranger company were lost on that beach...
...But those who have not seen the film should know that the nobility of the central figure, Captain John Miller (superbly rendered by Tom Hanks), and his men, is that they persevere in their duty despite the horrors of war, fears for their own survival, and understandable misgivings about an ambiguous mission...
Vol. 3 • August 1998 • No. 47
