It’s true that patriotism can morph in toxic directions. It is a good thing to risk one’s comfort and freedom, and ultimately when needed, one’s life, to protect others and resist evil. It is a good thing to defend the people we love and the nation we call home. The poet’s words endure over the centuries because, in their melancholic nobility, they’re true. They translate as “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s homeland,” or more accurately, “the land of one’s fathers.” * Two thousand years later, the same Latin words are carved in stone by another republic – our own – above an entrance to the Memorial Amphitheater at Washington’s Arlington National Cemetery. – the late Roman Republic of intense national pride, ambition, and territorial expansion. The Roman poet Horace wrote the famous line Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori in the first century B.C. As a result, the violence portrayed in The Pacific is both accurate and appalling in its realism. The Geneva Convention and its “rules of war” were widely ignored. The war in the Pacific had a deeper, purer level of unremitting ferocity, unencumbered by any memory of a commonly held religion or system of ethics, and often made worse by race hatred on both sides. The war in Europe was terrible and devastating, but it was waged in the rubble of a shared Western culture. I’ve seen the Spielberg film and both HBO series several times. More recently, HBO produced The Pacific (2010), a miniseries that followed Marines who fought in the jungles and across the islands of the Pacific. But it can come with a very high, very ugly price tag. Patriotism, properly understood, is a virtue. It wasn’t until Steven Spielberg’s brilliant Saving Private Ryan (1998), followed by the superb HBO miniseries, Band of Brothers (2001), that film found a way to blend the moral necessity of a just war with its bitter cost in suffering and violence. In their cynicism, movies became a kind of reverse image of the patriotic melodramas they replaced. War stories took a darker turn with Korea and Vietnam. I saw men like Bill and Joe reflected in those movies. Moral clarity, personal sacrifice, and a sense of national purpose pervaded that generation of combat films. I grew up in their shadow on a steady 1950s diet of heroic war films made in the wake of V-E and V-J Days. They were good men, very Catholic, and I loved them. Bill joined the army, crewed a tank destroyer, and saw action in Europe. Joe served as a Navy radioman on a submarine in the Pacific. But Bill and his other brother Joe made it to adulthood. Bill’s youngest brother Winnie died of diphtheria in childhood. The family lived half a notch above poverty. His dad worked the high beams in New York City construction. For many families, the storm clouds currently gathering over Ukraine stir up some poignant memories.īill Degnan was born at the end of World War I, the oldest boy in an Irish Catholic family of ten.
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