On the first Sunday in December, 1941, my father and mother came out of church. Like so many others, they got into their car, turned on their radio, and learned that our nation had been attacked. And, like so many other men, my father drove his wife home, kissed her goodbye, and went away to war. He didn't want to go. He had plans for his life, and he knew his decision might well cost him both. But he went anyway.
Though he is unique to me, my father was no different from so many men that December morning. They kissed their wives and sweethearts goodbye, hung up their dreams, their youths, their comfortable existences, and they went off and saved the world. In this cynical and jaded time, it is easy to overlook, or to dismiss, that simple, profound truth: They went off and, quite literally, saved civilization.
I knew this, intellectually, growing up. I studied history in my schooling and I knew the dates and the places and the events of the Second World War. Until I read Stephen Ambrose's excellent history of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, however, I did not realize how profound their devotion and sacrifice were.
The story of Easy Company, taken by Ambrose from interviews with its surviving members, is compelling at many levels. It is a powerful and thrilling war story, every bit as dramatic and moving as any fictional account ever written or filmed. There are all the classic elements of the war story: The "us against them" bonding in basic training; the terrible waiting as, having deployed to England, Easy's men prepare for the Normandy invasion; the terrifying night jump into France; the seemingly endless misery of one battle after another (Market-Garden to Bastogne to the drive into Germany). Band of Brothers is, plain and simple, an exciting read.
But it is much, much more than that. Throughout its pages what impressed me most was the clean realism of the men themselves. They were ordinary men, thrust by their simple devotion to loved ones, to country, and to that most ephemeral of concepts, "freedom," into a most extraordinary experience. Not all their actions were mimicry of John Wayne; far from it. Band of Brothers shows ordinary men in that horrible, extraordinary thing called war for what they are--men whose universe has shrunk to the simple, momentary imperative of survival; men for whom the guiding standard, truly the raison d'etre, is their own number. They endured the unendurable, because they would not fail their companions. They prevailed, because to do otherwise was to let one another down.
I have always believed we need heroes, and I have always believed that, in our hours of greatest need, those heroes have emerged. What Band of Brothers brought home most strongly to me was the accuracy of that belief, and the fact that our heroes are everywhere. In the final analysis, Band of Brothers is a book not only of tribute to our fathers but of hope for our own and coming generations. As one member of Easy Company put it, when asked by his grandson if he was a hero, "No, but I served in a company of heroes."
And so it was with my father, and so many other fathers--and men who never got to be fathers.