Saving Private Ryan is a kind of basic training. Most of the war films you will ever see do not put you so squarely in the shoes of the men fighting. That goes for both the combat itself and for the complex and wide range of emotions foisted upon its combatants as a result.
We aren’t here for a chronicle of events or a campaign. This isn’t exactly a recounting of a bold and daring caper or of survival and triumph against long odds and a vicious enemy. We aren’t even really witnessing brutality to inspire some sort of moral and ethical soul-searching.
We are, first and foremost, here to be in the shit with Capt. John H. Miller (Tom Hanks) and his battalion, to feel what it is like long before we have a moment to think about it. And the first thing we learn - sense, really - alongside Capt. Miller is that war overwhelms.
Director Steven Spielberg’s depiction of the Omaha Beach landing on D-Day is nothing short of the most visceral experience put on celluloid. It is loud and disorienting and frightening. Hanks’ trembling hands and the soon-to-open flaps on the boats ferrying troops through the surf fill you with dread. But the foreboding is nothing compared with the reality on shore. There is the sound of uninterrupted machine gun fire and shelling. You don’t see the bullets and bombs. Instead, you see the consequence of their impact in horrifying detail.
There is nowhere to go - no respite from the deafening sound, the trembling earth, the gritty sand or the unspeakable carnage. There is victory or there is death.
Spielberg’s filming of this sequence was so realistic that some veterans of the Second World War famously couldn’t sit through it themselves. It lasts some 20 minutes, which is apparently far more brief than the actual D-Day invasion, but is a needed mercy to the viewer. The scene paralyzes the body and the mind in such a way that a refractory period is needed. The fog of war lifts. We have all been through something now, and that something helps give the rest of the film heft.
Warfare is dehumanizing by its nature, and yet going through it alongside others seems to form the strongest possible human bonds. This is a great paradox, and it is the core insight at the heart of Saving Private Ryan.
Many of Capt. Miller’s men die on Omaha Beach. Those who don’t are almost immediately dispatched toward enemy lines to find the titular Private (James) Ryan (Matt Damon), who has lost all of his other brothers in combat. Miller’s men don’t like this, and it’s easy to understand why. They are being sent across the most dangerous territory on the planet to rescue just one man, a grunt no less, for what amounts to sentimental reasons. They’ve just survived the largest amphibious invasion in history. And after all, those assigned to this next rescue mission have wives and mothers and daughters, too.
In other words, these are scared survivors. Miller’s hands still tremble any time they stop for a rest. There is constant bluster about the wisdom and the fairness of their new mission. Underlying those complaints and questions, is a deep and abiding fear that more men in the battalion will be lost.
In war, or at least in this particular part of it, there is always the mission, and that mission has a way of casting aside the contradictions and moral quandaries that lie all around. It focuses you on the present, which is really the only thing of which you can make sense.
This, it seems to me, is Spielberg’s way of explaining the paradox. When you’re on the move, you are consumed by the moment - by the possible danger that lurks around every corner and how to navigate it without getting anyone killed. When you take a moment to collect yourself - realize where you’ve been and where you are - the past and the future immediately creep in.
In one moment, there are bloodied hands stacked on a belly to cover the gaping and gushing wounds of a beloved medic as he bleeds out. In another, the very same men callously make jokes as they rifle through a pile of dog tags to ensure that the Pvt. Ryan they are trying to save isn’t already among the dead.
In a film filled with them, this is one of the very hardest moments to watch. We’ve bonded with these men, but their bonds only extend so far. As they crack wise about the names in the pile of dog tags, men who could pair those names with faces - their own countrymen - file by and glare.
As all-consuming as the present is, Saving Private Ryan finds time to pose a very specific question about the past and another about the future.
Everyone in the battalion wants to know what Capt. Miller did before the war. And everyone - even Pvt. Ryan - wonders if this particular mission, one built entirely around a man - is worth the unspeakably heavy toll it exacts.
On the first question, we get a definitive answer. Miller, this unbelievable leader of men, was a schoolteacher. He reveals this in a moment where the mission he is leading is fraying under its own weight.
“So I guess I've changed some,” he says. “Sometimes I wonder if I've changed so much my wife isn’t even gonna be able to recognize me whenever it is I get back to her - and how I'll ever be able to tell her about days like today.”
“Ryan - I don't know anything about Ryan,” Miller continues. “I don't care. Man means nothin' to me. It's just a name. But if - you know - if going to Ramel and finding him so he can go home, if that earns me the right to get back to my wife - well, then, then that's my mission.
“You wanna leave? You wanna go off and fight the war? All right. All right, I won't stop you. I'll even put in the paperwork. I just know that every man I kill the farther away from home I feel.”
What Capt. Miller did before the war is an avenue for those of us who haven’t served to start to grasp what it is like. This single scene will do more to make you understand the soldier’s sacrifice than all the sanitized Salutes to Service and preferred airline boarding statuses that are doled out to veterans today. It’s a reminder of not just the what but the why.
Hauntingly, that leaves us all with the other question. Ryan is saved, barely, at the cost of the lives of Miller and almost all of his men.
“Earn this,” a gasping Miller tells Pvt. Ryan with his dying breaths. “Earn it.”
Decades later, Miller falls to his knees in a Normandy cemetery, wondering, first silently and then aloud to his elderly wife, if he did. She consoles and reassures him, as any of us would. But the question still hangs in the air.
Can anyone live a good enough life to earn that kind of sacrifice? I’m not so sure. All Ryan - and by extension the rest of us - can do is try to earn it in every moment over the course of the rest of our lives. It is a debt that is due every day, and one that can never be fully repaid.