Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Bridges at Toko-Ri,’ on ‘The Sacrifices of a Few’ in War)

[A WWII veteran, Lt. Harry Brubaker, has been drafted back into service in the Korean War as a Naval Reserve pilot, and asked to undertake a dangerous new mission.]

Rear Adm. George Tarrant [played by Fredric March]: “Son, whatever progress this world has made, it's always been because of the efforts and the sacrifices of a few.”

Lt. Harry Brubaker [played by William Holden, pictured]: “I was one of the few, Admiral, at New Guinea, Leyte, Okinawa. Why does it have to be me again?”

Tarrant: “Nobody ever knows why he gets the dirty job. And this is a dirty job.”— The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), screenplay by Valentine Davies, adapted from the novel by James Michener, directed by Mark Robson

I have known about this movie for quite a while, but had never seen it till this weekend, when I watched it in preparation for a talk next month on one of its stars, Grace Kelly (who plays Holden's loyal but worried wife). This quote seems especially appropriate on Veterans Day.

The screenplay is not everything it could have been, but it captures quite well the ambivalence that even the best service personnel, like Tarrant and Brubaker, feel about such conflicts. 

And the Oscar-winning special effects powerful approximate the visceral sensations involved with flying into the form of hell known as the combat zone—something that most of us will, fortunately, never experience firsthand.

Quote of the Day (Elizabeth Samet, on the Use of Force)

“The way we think and talk about force will influence not only the use of American military might abroad, but also our response to the violence that has increasingly been used as a tool of insurrection at home.”— American essayist and historian Elizabeth Samet, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness (2021)

This Veterans Day, even as we honor their service, let us remember to bind up their wounds—emotional as well as physical.

Photo of the Day: Korean War Memorial, Westfield, NJ

In October, while I was down in Westfield, NJ for the afternoon, my eye was drawn to a hillside near the traffic circle, where this railroad suburb has chosen to honor onetime residents in several American military conflicts: the Spanish-American War, World War II and Korea.

I think it might be worthwhile to highlight, in this brief description and the photo I took that day, the last of these, America’s so-called “Forgotten War, and the local servicemen who, as Abraham Lincoln put it at Gettysburg, gave “the last full measure of devotion” to duty, their comrades and country.

Westfield’s Korean War Memorial, dedicated in 2004, was created by a then-17-year-old high school senior, Kevin Devaney. The granite piece drew my eye not for its size but for its design: a cutout of Korea, a peninsula where, over three years, 6.8 million American men and women served. Approximately 54,200 of them died, with 33,700 of these occurring during combat.

The memorial honors three men who died within three months of each other:

* Charles A. Lipphardt, an army first lieutenant who, after serving in the South Pacific in WWII, returned to active duty in September 1950. Lipphardt, who died in February 1951, was awarded the Purple Heart, Combat Infantryman's Badge, Korean Service Medal, United Nations Service Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Korean War Service Medal.

* Richard R. Wilson, an army private first class, was listed as missing in action in January 1951.

* Griswold M. Hill Jr., a marine private first class, lost his life in March 1951.

Ranging in age from 24 to 30, this trio never had the chance for a normal life span. For many passersby in this busy downtown 70 years later, they might be merely names on a tablet. But they meant far more to their families and this community for years, and their sacrifice is worth recalling and honoring.

Quote of the Day (Tim O’Brien, on a Searing Vietnam War Experience)

“The field was boiling. The shells made deep slushy craters, opening up all those years of waste, centuries worth, and the smell came bubbling out of the earth. Two rounds hit close by. Then a third, even closer, and immediately, off to his left, he heard somebody screaming.”—American novelist Tim O’Brien, “Speaking of Courage,” in The Things They Carried (1990)

The interconnected stories in the acclaimed The Things They Carried are harrowing, sometimes difficult to read, as seen by the angry responses they continue to evoke from some readers on Amazon. In this, they resemble nothing so much as the visceral reactions that America’s major conflicts since the end of World War II have sometimes inspired.

For the soldiers in Alpha Company, “the things they carried” represent not just the physical material they lug around Vietnam, but also the psychological burden hauled by the survivors of that conflict, a weight not understood by civilians. 

One of these occurred in the scene begun above, when Norman Bowker witnessed his comrade Kiowa slide to his death amid all that "waste" (an unforgettable symbol for what the war meant for so many).

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln urged his countrymen to help with the essential post-Civil War duties “to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.” More than a century and a half after he uttered those words, those tasks remain just as essential this Veterans Day.

Photo of the Day: World War II Memorial, Washington DC

The debt owed by Americans to the Greatest Generation is enormous. The scope of World War II—a global conflict requiring an all-out effort on the homefront, the service of 16 million members of the U.S. armed forces, and the ultimate sacrifice of more than 400,000 of these Americans—is staggering.

So is the World War II Memorial, designed by the former chief of the Rhode Island School of Design, Friedrich St. Florian, and dedicated in 2004. I visited it nine years later, when I took this photo of its Rainbow Pool with its impressive fountains.

In keeping with this sprawling conflict, this DC site is immense, with 24 bronze bas-relief panels and granite columns telling the story of the Atlantic and Pacific Theaters.

I particularly like this quote inscribed in this stone architecture by President Harry S. Truman, in an address broadcast to the armed forces on Apr. 17, 1945:

“Our debt to the heroic men and valiant women in the service of our country can never be repaid. They have earned our undying gratitude. America will never forget their sacrifices.”