War is Heck

I usually tune out when a war documentary comes on t.v. I was never a big fan of war history despite the fact that my dad and my uncle read book after book on the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. They planned vacations around visiting battlefields, history centers, and monuments. The history of those wars--and others--was their hobby. Today the boomers seem to be fixated on WWII both in fiction and in fact. The Greatest Generation, of which Tom Brokaw wrote, is the current obsession. Perhaps because so many of our fathers/mothers, grandfathers/grandmothers and greatgrandfathers/greatgrandmothers were involved in it or lived through it and either died in it or are about to die and are reliving and releasing horriffic memories before they can rest in peace.

I read with interest in the NYTimes today http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/arts/television/22pbs.html?th&emc=th
that Ken Burns is in the process of creating another documentary for PBS on war. This time it will be WWII. It has always seemed to me that war documentaries tend to romanticize or glamorize war instead of depict the brutal reality of war. However in the upcoming documentary by Burns, we may all be faced with the more brutal truth.

Burns is encountering censorship issues because his oral history of veterans includes obscenities as survivors of WWII describe the horrors of fighting in that war. Some things can only be emotionally expressed with swear words. The fact that Burns will be going to the mat on this issue with the FCC, gives me hope that viewers young and old will get a realistic and unromanticized dose of the human cost of war.

Only by exposing the truth about war, will the average citizen being to think about how we can avoid war in the future and more actively and vehemently protest when our government enters our country--and its citizens--into a war.