War! What is it good for? Absolutly nothing.War is the search for power and supremacy as a replacement for a lack of contact with love inside the body. The boom boom and fireworks and hurting others is a projection of the loss of contact with the effervescent, sensational feeling of love that is deep inside the body and said to emanate from the heart, the core of our being. Our minds have been colonised by all media and our most real life experiences are often are lived through films, songs, words replacing the very real sense of the deepest,mysterious, softest, sweetest love that lives inside every single body born.We search for clues to make contact with love inside through all media- to feel something, so removed from the sweet sensation of simply being alive in a body, on the earth in this rare and wondrous experience called life. It's in there right now, at this very moment but the thinking, over stimulated mind is so crowded it has lost touch with the feeling of love. War exists because humans have forgotten to make love rightly and connect at the deepest level with the love that lives inside all. It is covered over,behind the armour of thought and intellect. War is the sad display of impotence and the inability to love all life.

Oops... Regarding my previous comment on March 22, I confused my Vietnam war movie titles. I meant, of course, The Deer Hunter.

Hi, No wars, please. Look what happened to/because of the war to Sargeant Bales. Eugenia

I tried calling in put it was too late in the show.
The scene you aired from Private Ryan was misidentified. This scene comes early in the movie, and depicts George Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, informed by his subordinates, that three of Private Ryan's brothers have been killed in action in the last few days.
They are questioning whether it could be possible for the army to find Ryan and pull him out of action, to spare his mother the possibility of losing all her sons.
You hear Marshall reading a letter he always keeps handy, which is President Lincoln's condolence letter to a mother in Boston who lost all her sons in the Civil War.
The last sentence Marshall says to his quiet subordinates is this:
'the boy's alive, and we are going to get HIM the HELL out of THERE'.
It is Marshall's order which forms the basis of all the actions Hank's undertakes with his search platoon for the rest of the film, as most of the group is shot and killed, one by one, including Hanks in the end.
His last words to Ryan, who makes it out of the last assault alive (and who makes that pilgrimage to the Normandy cemetery at the end of the film with his family) are 'Earn it!'

Actually the voiceover clip from the end of saving private ryan is a reading a letter which in the film would be written, read and signed by George C. Marshall, if I am not mistaken...

Check out the documentary, "Apocalypse". It's a doc of WW2.The last segment explains how the U.S. rebuilt the devastated countries. Contrast with Iraq.

I think part of the problem is that most war movies/plays/etc. are about the people doing the fighting & too few are about the people who live where the fighting is happening (or lived there & were displaced) & had armed men show up one day & start shooting or bombing. We hear about PTSD in soldiers (& we should) but hardly ever about PTSD in civilians where the war is fought--or even in the soldiers of the other side, who may not have had a choice about being sent to war.

Thank you for mentioning (even briefly) the significance of the Hunger Games! I'm disappointed that the PR for the film has been all E! News and mall tours...I hope that the books and films can yet create a space for young people (and all of us who enjoyed the books, really)to think seriously about the important themes within. Poverty, war, police brutality...the list goes on and on.

Dystopian novels offer us insights on the world in which we live..what happens when we realize that Katniss and Rue live here in the U.S.?

The movie that made me see war most clearly was actually Children of Men. Though it was technically a sci fi movie, and an imaginary scenario, the war scenes were the most terrifying I have ever seen on screen. They were very real, and the sound engineering really made you feel as if you were there.

The concept of the film - a world where there are no more children, where women have ceased to be able to give birth, put a pall over the whole thing that was incredibly dreadful and frightening.

Your discussion ignores the fact that that modern warfare in the U.s. is always remote . The experience of your home no longer being a refuge and terror without end is not part of the contemporary american experience.
It only is the purview of the military combatants , the civilian population has no clue. any media representation therefore is always a remote representation of a remote experience.

Even as a little kid the concept of war terrified me, despite the fact that every male in my family has been engaged in one war or another. My brother is a Vietnam veteran, and I vividly remember the tension and fear in our house while he was there. Years later I saw "Apocalypse Now" in a theater, and when the scene changed from life in everyday Pittsburgh to the violence of Vietnam, I experienced a visceral reaction, and considered leaving at intermission. Only then did I 'connect', however slightly, to the reality my brother had lived. I stayed for the rest of the movie, however, but I felt very queasy throughout.

"War" involves many activities, some might even be interesting and fun. "Combat" is what can't be captured on film: It's confusing and terrifying.

Agreed, re: the book "None of Us Were Like This Before." Actually what I found so interesting about it was the way in which people - senior officials and ordinary troops - bought into fiction & myths (i.e., "cultural representations of war" as Brian keeps saying) SHAPE ideas about violence and torture. It's an incredible book, and intersects directly with Jonathan Shay's book, "Achilles and Vietnam."

my 11th grade history teacher had us watch Gallipoli during our unit on WW I. Watching Mel Gibson die certainly brought that war home to me more than any text book could have! I've always had a good grasp of trench warfare because of that.

I saw Platoon when it first came out and was still able to be shocked by the killing of the Vietnamese villagers. In the audience there were some who cheered on the gruesome spectacle and that is something I will never forget.

Kubrick's Paths of Glory maybe shocked me more than most war movies portraying as it did the court marshalling and execution of men both good natured and guilty only of not understanding why they were supposed to jump in front of the cannons to almost certainly die, and the utter stupidity and arrogance of their superiors.

This discussion would not be complete without "Achilles in Vietnam" and "Odysseus in America" - have either of the interviewees read these books by psychiatrist/PTSD specialist Dr. Jonathan Shay?

I was always very gun-ho, patriotic, carefully engaged in heroic behavior... after I watched the Longest Day and the Bridge on the River Kwai, in the early 60's. My view totally changed with Black Hawk down and even more with Saving Private Ryan, especially when a combatant goes back to pick up his own arm that had been blown off.

I keep meditating on the book NONE OF US WERE LIKE THIS BEFORE, which grapples with powerful homecoming themes for veterans - and also how movies, myths, and fiction inform our ideas about war and violence (in dangerous and revealing ways).

There's this film out of Byelorussia (sp?) called "Come and See"--its signature sequence is the annihilation of a village by German soldiers in (nearly) real time. I think that any film that shows how average people's lives are disrupted by ruthless, random violence are more effective than any out-and-out combat film such as "Saving Private Ryan"

Virtual wars in the form of video games are a GREAT outlet for the natural mostly male impulse towards organized violence whose roots are probably in our primate genes.

To Ed

I bet today you'd be more likely in the light of modern events to get a 10 million mass of people to kneel and shout,." We DON'T want God. We DON'T want God. We DON'T want God," because in the light of what has been going in the Middle East over the last few decades.

But regarding war in general, I hate WAR but love war-like military video games. Maybe video games will be the outlet for natural, mostly male warlike impulses.

There's a very good movie called 'Nine days that changed the world' about Pope John Paul II in Poland in the early 1980s. There were 10 million people present/listening to the Mass in Warsaw's Victory Square, and the Mass was interrupted by people chanting 'We want God, we want God, we want God'. They say now that the Soviet Union was finished at that moment.

This is an example in our time of overcoming evil without war.