When Dad and I saw Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, I asked him what he thought of it. He’d been a helicopter medic stationed in Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, during the American war in Vietnam, and so I wondered how closely the film aligned with the experience of combat. I remember him saying he liked the film for the most part, but also him complaining that writers of war movies always get the same thing wrong.
“When I was pumping morphine into soldiers who had been shot or dismembered,” he said in his deep, clear voice, the kind baseball announcers use during uneventful plays, “they never asked me to pass on information to their girlfriend. Mostly they screamed. And if they could say anything, they would say: ‘I’m dying. I’m dying. Oh my God, am I going to die?’ Burn victims were the absolute worst.”
