It seems that the subject of war trauma and its psychological effects have been forefront in the news as we debate the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and hear stories of personal tragedy. I wrote this commentary on Saving Private Ryan shortly after it came out, but unfortunately it remains timely.
I have worked for many years as the director of an outpatient program for combat veterans at a local VA hospital. When Saving Private Ryan was showing in the theaters, I advised combat veterans not to see it, on the theory that they were seeing enough combat in their dreams and memories, and told everyone else to see it, particularly if they wanted to better understand the effects of combat trauma. The film could well be used as a primer for understanding the “affects” of combat.
In my work with combat veterans, I have been impressed with the importance of the effects and interactions of four affect clusters: fear, anger, guilt and grief. The film, with its near virtual reality presentation of war (more effective, I think, on the large screen than on the smaller square of my television), brings these affects home to us quite directly. In this presentation, I’ll use my own affective reactions as a guide in the hope that they are not particularly idiosyncratic. I suspect that most viewers struggled with the same issues and feelings that I did.
The film’s plot is simple enough. After the invasion on Normandy beach in June, 1944, three brothers have been killed within a week, one in the Pacific, the other two in the Normandy invasion. We see their mother sinking to the boards of her porch as the military car arrives at her doorstep and an officer and chaplain step out. A group of men, led by Captain John Miller, is sent into the French countryside in the midst of the invasion to find and bring back the lone remaining son of Mrs. Ryan.
Fear
I have heard several second hand stories of people who closed their eyes, walked out, or deliberately came late to avoid the film’s opening combat scene which depicts the initial embarkation on Normandy beach, June 6, 1944. This scene has been depicted elsewhere in film (i.e. The Longest Day, The Americanization of Emily), but probably nowhere with such a concerted attempt to convey to us the subjective experience.
We are brought to that subjective sense first through the means of introduction of the scene. The film opens with a group of people, led by an older man, walking into the graveyard for American soldiers buried on the beach. The old man approaches a grave and we enter his eyes. We feel we are seeing the scene through eyes that have been there.
We see the men crowded together on the embarkation boats, see their faces, sense their fear, see them vomit. Then the gate opens, the men start to move out, and we are shocked to see bullets ripping through the first line of men, men whom we realize were virtually doomed, sacrificed so that some of the men behind them could get onto the beach. The camera takes us beneath the water where bullets cut through men’s bodies, filling the water with billows of red and leaving corpses. On the beach, we follow Captain Miller as he attempts to work his way up, seeing men falling in every direction. As he climbs onto the beach, the man he is holding on to is shot through the chest and killed. (One thing I have come to realize working with combat veterans is that the ones I see are the lucky ones who survived for no particular reason other than the direction of a bullet, shell, or piece of shrapnel.) Twice Miller is deafened by the explosions around him. In the silence, we witness grotesqueries, like three men burned in a sudden blaze or a man picking up his arm and running with it. At one point, he finds himself pulling a dead torso. Despite his obvious fear, he pulls himself together to give orders, telling his men if they remain down on the beach, they’re dead men. At one point, once they had established a position, Miller stands up momentarily to draw fire away from a sharpshooter he wants to get to a better position. His sergeant tells him if his mother saw him do that she’d be angry.
The overwhelming emotion is fear, mixed with horror. Action follows too quickly for grief, or for any other emotion. I found myself torn between the wish to remain involved with the film and a need to distance myself, to remind myself that I am not going through that, that I am not in danger. Perhaps because I have worked with combat veterans extensively, I was very aware that if I am this frightened watching this scene in a comfortable movie theater in New York in 1998, then I could not fathom the degree of raw fear facing those men. I was particularly impressed by the fact that bullets are unseen until they reach a target, that at any moment there is a great likelihood of being struck and killed or mutilated, my life ended or irrevocably changed.
I was also impressed by the degree of confusion. The danger, the noise, the melee of action was so enormous as to defy comprehension. I marveled at the ability of Captain Miller and his men to begin to make sense of their position. One of the things we can learn repeatedly from this film is that action, being active and having a purpose, is an antidote to fear.
This fear, most prominent at the beginning and in the film’s last battle scene, pervades the entire film. Even as we walk with the men through a quiet French field, I found myself, perhaps again influenced by my work with combat vets, aware of the possibility of a sniper. Nevertheless, I was also aware of the added pleasure of such moments which served as a reprieve from the intense fear and pain of the battle scenes.
The film gives us a group of characters with whom we can identify. The most prominent, Captain Miller, provides a partial ideal for identification, not immune to war like a John Wayne caricature—he has an intermittent tremor in his right hand—but innured to it. He is a natural leader, whose men will follow even if the mission is “fubar”. His theme, to get home intact, captures the primary goal of survival described to me by many combat veterans. “I don’t know anything about Ryan, I don’t care. The man means nothing to me, it’s just a name; but, if … finding him so he can go home, if that earns me the right to get back to my wife, well then that’s my mission.”
We are also allowed to identify with Upham, a non-combat soldier dragged into the conflict. Upham is an intellectual, not a naturally physical person. He tells Miller at the beginning that he has not had combat training. His tool is a typewriter. He does not choose to be in combat. We can identify with him, some more than others, because he is virtually like us, a civilian. If Miller represents for many what we would like to be in a combat situation, Upham gives us a taste of what we fear we are. As civilians, we can understand him.
In the final battle scene, Miller and his men have found Private Ryan, but are trapped in a situation in which they must help defend a strategic bridge against superior German forces. Miller devises a plan in which they will attempt to lure the German tanks into the town’s main street and disable them there, trapping the Germans in an ambush. It works only partially, and as the battle unfolds, the American positions are overrun with close and hand to hand fighting.
Upham is given the job of carrying ammunition from one building to another to supply the Americans. With invisible bullets moving through the air at all angles, Upham builds up courage each time he must run across an opening to deliver his ammunition. Finally, he finds himself with his back to a post while German soldiers run into the building behind him and up the stairs to attack his comrades, sniping at the Germans from a second floor room. We watch in agony as Upham stands frozen while one of the Americans is killed in hand to hand combat by a German soldier. As the German comes down the stairs, Upham stands frozen, consciously or unconsciously conveying that he is not a threat, and the German does not shoot him.
I found it very easy to identify with Upham’s frozen fear as he hoped he would not be seen by the Germans, who would have shot him down. I wished that I could push him out of that frozen state, but recognized a panic that does not always answer to will. It was as if my inability to move Upham was akin to his own inability to move himself. Knowing that I could not be assured that I would have behaved differently (if I had survived such an experience at all), I could also identify with the shame that we do not see, but which I imagine he would have had to feel afterwards.
The fear which touches us through the three hours of the film can only be a small fraction of what real survivors of that invasion endured over a period of days, weeks or months. Many of the men who endured many days of combat live with that fear beyond the battlefield. Even during a quiet period, or maybe especially so, they cannot dismiss the danger. They often live a continual battle with fear, attempting through various means, alloplastic (keeping weapons by them, using unusual security precautions) and autoplastic (numbing their emotions, substituting other strong emotions, such as rage) as well as some that fall between the two (sleeping lightly if at all, remaining on guard at all times.)
Attitude Toward the Enemy
Rage can be used effectively to defend against fear. As viewers, I think we easily identify with the combatant’s fear. Their rage and sadism towards the enemy is harder for the civilian viewer to identify with. There are many films that present the cruelty of the enemy in such a way that we can easily experience the wish to retaliate in kind, but Private Ryan does not do that. Rage seems to come from the combat itself and from the fear it engenders. After the terrible battle on Normandy beach, when the Americans have taken the position, they shoot German soldiers whose arms are raised in surrender, laughing as they do so. At one point, they set a German machine gun position on fire and as the Germans dive out in flames, an American soldier yells out, “Don’t shoot! Let them burn!” We are given no additional justification for it. The heat of battle is sufficient explanation.
This issue is brought home in a later scene in which the small group that is looking for Private Ryan comes upon a German machine gun position in a French field. They mount an attack and capture the gunner at the cost of their medic’s life. Most of the men want to kill the prisoner. They know they can’t afford to take him with them. Here, too, it is Upham who voices “civilian” sensibilities. He cannot see how they can kill a defenseless prisoner. The German is frightened and fawning. We can sense his humanity and feel his fear. I found myself caught in the dilemma, aware of my empathy for the German, yet understanding that he has killed one of them and might kill more Americans if left alive. When the captain decides to let the prisoner go, it nearly causes a mutiny. Their prisoner returns to haunt them at the end of the film.
I was also very conscious of the fact that most of the combat veterans I have treated would have no ambivalence about killing the enemy prisoner in this situation. In a sense they are right. Surviving combat, physically and mentally, requires that you dehumanize the enemy. Empathy is maladaptive in this very far from average expectable environment. One of the consistent features I have noticed in Vietnam veterans, who often were forced to consider civilians amongst the enemy, is that their guilt and self punishment over killing were directly related to their empathy for the Vietnamese. One veteran who eventually died because of his self destructive behavior had been put into a position in which he befriended Vietnamese villagers late in his tour. He could not dismiss the killing he had done earlier once he let down his guard against empathy. Obviously, that guilt can be unconscious—some veterans protest too loudly that they have no feeling for those they killed, betraying an underlying guilt; but, there are some who maintain an almost paranoid attitude that seems to offer some protection against self hatred and depression.
The film brings us back to the dilemma near the end when the German soldier they’d released appears again with the German army. He is the one who kills one of them in intense hand to hand combat while Upham stands on the stairway frightened. Later he shoots Captain Miller. Once the battle has turned, Upham holds a rifle on this man and some others. When the German appeals to him, using his name, Upham shoots him, presumably out of shame and guilt over his cowardice as well as his rage. The problem presented is that in the war zone morality, protecting one’s fellow soldiers takes precedence over any ethics about killing. It is later, in peace time with its very different moral standards, that the combat veteran must cope with his guilt over either killing or not killing the enemy.
Guilt and Mourning
When they finally find Ryan, he refuses to leave the men he is with, defending a bridge in a French town. He tells Miller that he won’t abandon the only brothers he has left. War forces men together with an intimacy that only closeness to death can create. A soldier’s closest support comes from the men with him who “watch his back”. When a soldier dies, another soldier loses his closest friend in the world.
It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between survivor guilt and mourning. They hang together as a reaction to the same event. The very premise of the film brings up the issue of survivor guilt. As they walk through the French countryside, Miller’s men begin to wonder why Ryan’s life is worth more than theirs. It brings home a basic truth about war that strikes at every soldier’s narcissism, that his life and that of his buddy, is expendable, at the disposal of the purposes of the army.
In one of the film’s quiet moments, Captain Miller talks about the men who have died under his command, including Caparzo who had just been killed, and describes the rationalizations he uses to protect himself from the enormous feeling of responsibility. “You see, when you end up killing one of your men, you tell yourself it happened so you could save the lives of two or three or ten others. Maybe a hundred others. You know how many men I’ve lost under my command? … ninety four. But that means I’ve saved the lives of ten times that many, doesn’t it? Maybe even twenty … and that’s how simple it is. That’s how you rationalize making the choice between the mission and the men.” He has a responsibility to the army, his duty; he has a responsibility to his men; and, he has a responsibility and a wish to survive the war to return to his wife. Those three responsibilities and goals sometimes converge and sometimes diverge. We can feel some of that sense of loss as we see members of the group of soldiers we have been watching shot down in battle.
The film is about saving Mrs. Ryan a final grief. We hear a lot about mothers in this film. Men call to their mothers as they are dying. In one of the quieter moments, two of the men talk about their mothers and lost opportunities to talk with them. Death is presented, at least in part, as an irreversible separation from mother.
But, it is the film’s “trick ending” that brings home the sense of grief and survivor guilt. The trick goes back to the beginning of the film. We saw an elderly man walk to a grave in the Normancy beach cemetary. The camera enters his eyes to the scene of the Normandy invasion where we share the experience with Captain Miller. Film convention tells us that a fade from a man’s eyes to a scene means that we are looking back on that scene as he remembers it. Throughout the film, we believe that we are seeing the events through the eyes of Captain Miller. We don’t know how, but we know that he has somehow made it home to grieve.
We have come to know him and to admire him. He is presented to us as a model leader of men. He knows how to get the most from his men. He knows how to keep his head in the incredible confusion of battle. Most of all, he seems to do all this without losing his humanity. He is the man we would like to be in combat. We want to identify with him. We also have been told in the opening scene that it is safe to identify with him. We know he will survive because we are seeing everything through his memory.
Not so. In the final battle scene, in a last act of heroism, he is badly wounded. Private Ryan, who has finally been found, comes to his side. With his last words, he tells Ryan, “James, earn this. Earn it.” It is Private Ryan who is saved and whom we see at the cemetary and Captain Miller who has died. Faced with the death of this very special man in an attempt to save his life, the elderly Ryan says, “Every day I think of what you said to me that day on the bridge. I’ve tried to live my life the best I could. I hope that was enough. I hope that at least in your eyes I’ve earned what all of you have done for me.” He asks his wife pleadingly, “Tell me I’ve led a good life! Tell me I’m a good man!”
The film’s trickery has allowed us to think we are seeing things through the eyes of Captain Miller and then shown us we are seeing them through Ryan’s eyes. It is as if John Miller has died in place of James Ryan. The film allows us to sense what it is like to know that someone else has died to save you, the enormous burden of that. Unfortunately, many veterans cannot cope with their guilt as positively as Private Ryan did. They feel that they are not entitled to enjoy their lives and families because their buddies do not have that. They feel that the man who died on the patrol they should have been on was more deserving of a life.
The film’s “trick” also allows us to feel the fuller impact of the grief. It comes as a shock to us to learn that Captain Miller has died. Having thought that we saw him as an old man, we are preconsciously aware of the life that he was not able to live. We feel the loss of this man we had come to love. We want to believe that Private Ryan’s good life and the family he has fathered somehow fulfills John Miller’s dreams of the life he wanted to go on living after the war. We want to believe, but can we?
Originally published in the PANY Bulletin, Spring, 2000
Herbert H. Stein