On Thursday and Friday, the Spike channel was playing the episodes of Band of Brothers all day. Now, even though we own the DVD’s of the whole series, I still get hooked every time it’s on TV. That show was flawless, and I can’t wait until The Pacific comes out.
Every time I watch anything about World War II, I can’t help but think about my grandpa. He was in the Navy during the war, and decided to be a diver. From what I gathered, what that entailed was jumping off the boat and checking to make sure there weren’t any bombs around. He didn’t talk much about it, just joked that the only reason he took the position was because the diver was the only one on the ship who got to drink. Apparently, every time you resurfaced from a dive, they gave you a shot of brandy. I love the idea that my grandpa chose his position based on access to booze. It’s how I know we’re related.
But honestly, I know very little about his time in the war. No one knows very much. He never talked about it. Never talked about the people he met or the friends he made. Never really talked about what he saw, except that on D-Day, they were off the shores of Normandy and he had to dive down to remove the bodies of dead soldiers from the propellers of the ship. Perhaps we were all so horrified at that story he knew he couldn’t tell us any more.
When Saving Private Ryan came out, my mom offered to take my grandpa to go see it. We all thought he’d appreciate what was finally an accurate depiction of the war. He refused. He said he’d been there, he’d seen it, and he didn’t need to see it again. I think it was the first time I realized that the war actually affected him. That he wasn’t the smiling, dapper guy in those navy blue bell bottoms that his pictures portrayed, but a man who had witnessed the horror of war and needed no reminder of it.
My grandpa was so gentle, it’s hard to imagine him touched by the violence of World War II. I look at my brother, who seems to be haunted by the demons of Iraq on a regular basis. Over 2 years later and he still has trouble sleeping at night, and absolutely can’t sleep unless the house is the exact right temperature. But he reads books about the war in Iraq, watches movies, plays war video games. It’s interesting to me how two men who saw so much violence reacted to it so differently.
My brother grows impatient when we ask him what things were like over in Iraq. My grandpa glossed over the details by telling funny stories. My brother-in-law barely speaks about his time in Afghanistan and Iraq at all. Maybe that’s why a show like Band of Brothers intrigues me so much. Maybe it’s because that show is the closest I can get to understanding what my loved ones have gone through.