What a lot of great discussion. I found the series some what of a re-hash of old video clips I had seen before, but the personalization of it from all sides in specific communities was really the point. It was great and just what you'd expect from Burns. It was just super for me, and brought back old memories of my adolescent wonderment at the roles of my father and his friends from the little North Dakota community in which I grew up. WWII was fresh still when I was in grade school in the 50's. Dad, my hero, was a glider pilot. His cousin was married to a Bataan Death March survivor (I began to understand him better after the time he found my brothers and I had acquired a motorcycle in 1964. He had been excited about it but once he saw it was Japanese he shrunk from it speechless, downright physically ill. I'll never forget the look on his face.) The neighbor was a Bronze Star-winning tank driver, some had been in the Pacific with dirty fighting, my friend's mother was a Belgian war bride, the guy who ran the gas station was a DFC winning gunner in B-17's who could never quite drink it all away, my friend in college - his dad flew the Polesti raids, Dad's partner in his aerial crop spraying business was a P-39 and P-38 pilot in the Pacific, the guy in the next town flew B-17's and never had the heart to fly again, Dad's friend, for whom I worked, was in the Navy, and one of the two NoDaks Pearl Harbor survivors. There were a thousand local stories, and somehow, though no one really seemed to talk directly about it, we all heard plenty. (It was so different with the local Korean war vets, and later with my generation of Vietnam Vets, yet those people went through the same hell, but with different public support.) I heard a lot about my Dad's adventures from my uncle. That's how it went. Everybody, and I'm not talking only about soldiers, but the parents and siblings - everybody, contributed some way and suffered some hardship, some more than others. Most of the guys lost their youth years, yet many got experiences and education they otherwise wouldn't have, and it changed them forever, which only became clear to some of us later, when we looked at our veterans as regular human survivors of the odds, as opposed to the heroes we wanted as kids. Later in the real working world I found myself side-by-side (SxS!) in the research department of a major corporation with a simple straightforward guy who wore a black bow-tie every day, who happened to relate one day, after he heard me talk about my flying, that he had been a B-29 instructor pilot He wangled himself a combat assignment finally, and arrived at Tinian the day before Tibbets flew out to Hiroshima. You'd never have guessed it. It goes on and on.....regular US citizens in a nation-defining moment. There were others....One co-worker at the same company was a Jewish Pole (his family kept the Jewish part secret somehow) born in a work camp in Russia (fortuantely Russia rather than Germany) in 1940 and brought back by the Russians to re-populate Poland in 1946. One of the lucky ones. I eventually met both his parents, who, like he and his wife, finally emigrated here in the mid 70's, with God knows what kind of influence.
The series was great. PeteM's reaction/experience seemed much like my own. Thanks PeteM. Sorry for the ramble, but the point is history was all around us as we baby-boomers grew up. Ken Burns didn't intend to cover everything and no one could. He does a marvelous job of making us see and understand the human condition. I don't want our kids to forget what was done, what is still around them, and what was necessary all these years ago, and even since then, regardless of how bad some actions have turned out. This is a great country. I have traveled internationally a lot for work in the last 25 years, and the USA is really different -- not perfect, but honestly quite a much preferred place by almost all on earth who experience it. I hope we can keep it that way. War isn't the way, but we simply have to recognize our heritage and what it means to be a nation -- that some things are worth the sacrifice. Frankly, it would be very difficult for most Americans to tolerate the lifestyle available to the average person in any other place. Best Wishes.
