The War

So, Gentle Reader, have you been watching “The War?” The show has been running on PBS for over a week now and except for Sunday-last’s installment, I’ve watched it all. And I’ve mostly been impressed with the first-person accounts directors Burns and Novick have assembled. Really, the first-person narratives are what distinguish this particular documentary from all the others…and there have been many… about Big Bang Two. And there was an amusing example last evening…

I’m writing from memory, Gentle Reader, so I could be mistaken about the details in this particular anecdote. But, as I recall, the subject was jokes and Marine pilot Sam Hynes related what he recalls as the best joke from the war. He opened up with “the joke was visual…and you had to see it, not hear it.” “It was in the Officers Club bar on Kwajalein (or Enewetak?)… but anyway, behind the bar, mounted on a large plaque…like a marlin or a tarpon… was this huge brassiere. And underneath the brassiere was the legend…

‘Remember Pearl Olsen!’”

That may be a “you hadda be there” sort of moment for some of you, but most of us recall “Remember Pearl Harbor!” as the watch phrase during The Big One. Leave it to fighter pilots (or other flight crew members) to irreverently remind one and all what they were really fighting for…

One more thing about “The War” and then I’ll leave it go. One of the criticisms I’ve read in multiple places is how Burns’ anti-war views bleed thorough in this film. I definitely noticed one such example last evening during the segments on the fire-bombings of Dresden and multiple Japanese cities, e.g., Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, etc. In addition to the narrative, which took pains to point out that most of the victims of these bombings were women and children (“over 100,000 children died during these bombings…”), the soundtrack was the usual tug-on-the-heartstrings solo violin dirge, explicitly designed to evoke pity. Violins are good for that, ya know. Nothing better, actually, in the world of music.

Now if it had been me scoring that particular segment I’d have used this:

Yeah, I know: it’s been done before. So?

My criticism aside, watch the re-runs if you missed it the first time around. It’s more than worthwhile.