The Danger Zone
Yesterday was Memorial Day, the day when we are supposed to honor those Americans who have given their vitality and perhaps their very lives in defense of our country, in defense of democracy. It is a day I take quite seriously and I made that small gesture of flying the American flag out in front of the house, like I try to do every year. You see, I was too young for Vietnam and for the draft and coming through my adolescence with the anti-war protests at their peak certainly didn’t make many of my age want to serve in the military voluntarily. So, I never served in the military. I don’t think it would be correct to say that I regret that since I have never wished I had, but I do greatly respect those who have and especially those who went to war on my and other Americans’ behalf. I understand well enough that some men are natural warriors and like going to war, but that does not diminish my sense of respect. There does seem to be a difference between those who are not unwilling to go into the danger zone and those with evil and cruel intent, so I do very much distinguish the two.
Whether by happenstance or intent, I spent part of the day watching the new Tom Cruise extravaganza, Top Gun:Maverick, at the Angelika Theater, and revisiting the Band of Brothers series on HBO Max. I am drawn to military movies in a way that I have never been completely able to reconcile with who I am or who I have been my whole life. I am especially drawn to WWII movies also, which, as best I can attribute, has to do with the fact that I spent my youth with a romanticized sense of the glory of battle as depicted by air/sea battles in the Pacific and infantry engagements in the European land war. Top Gun, with its aerial dogfight sequences, is quite captivating to me even though I like the impersonal SAM missile encounters less than the actual plane on plane skirmishes. The fact that Tom Cruise, who most of us met for the first time in Risky Business in 1983 (though I remember him from his small role in Taps in 1981), evokes a sense of wistful sympathy. He is the one-dimensional combat fighter pilot who has nothing in his life except his flying skills and his honor and duty, particularly towards his old fallen comrade, Goose. He looks good compared to others who appeared in the 1986 original film, but at age 60, he is also old enough to look quite different in his helmet, where one only sees the fleshiness of his face. The appropriate tag line when people ask him “what that face means” as he shows his angst, is to say, “its the only one I’ve got.” He swears to the tabloids that he has never nor will ever have any reconstructive face surgery.
As much as I like and admire Tom Cruise and his acting…or at least the roles and persona he adopts on the screen, his inner warrior seems less about doing right by the world and more about “just do it.” He has no compunction about going into the danger zone as a man who insists on doing his own stunts and staying fit enough to come out of them alive. That is all commendable, but not the same as real human empathy. I am talking about the empathy in the eyes of Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan or of Damian Lewis in Band of Brothers. They both epitomize more leaders than warriors. They lead men into battle and encourage and care for them while disliking everything about war. They want not to have to do it, they want not to have to send their men to do it, but when it needs to be done, they go into the danger zone due to a sense of duty. The quality of their heroics seems to me to far exceed the heroics of the solitary warrior who straps it on without fears of loss of life or limb. Tom Cruise comes across as having nothing to lose and Damian Lewis comes across as wanting desperately not to have anyone under his command lose what they have and hold dear the most. Sometimes that is their lives and sometimes it is their sense of self worth. Either way, it is the leaders in the model of Damian Lewis’s Lt./Captain/Major Winters that show us the empathy and understanding for the danger zone that it truly deserves.
While I watched Band of Brothers when it first aired some twenty years ago, HBO Max was promoting it for the Memorial Day Weekend and it struck a nerve in me, so I watched it, more or less without Kim (she is too jangled by the reality of war to enjoy such a series). I had never seen the ninth episode which is called Why We Fight. It tells the story of Easy Company’s first foray into Germany as they head through Bavaria towards Berchtesgaden soon after Hitler’s suicide. Outside Landsberg am Lech they encounter a sub-camp of the Dachau Concentration Camp called Kaufering. It is an expertly crafted story that shows the shock and awe of discovering something so horrific that all their battles from Normandy to Bastogne couldn’t compare with the grim reality they found just outside of an idyllic Bavarian town that looked to be out of a storybook as it had escaped most of the damage of war. That is juxtaposed against a scene where a soldier enters a home and smashes a memorial photo of a German SS officer and is given a serious stink-eye from the man’s wife, who is righteously still in residence. The episode ends with the same soldier walking through the concentration camp while the local citizens, who claimed to be ignorant of the existence of the camp (a fabrication too blatant to be believed), are tasked by the American command with disposing of the dead Jewish bodies that are stacked in the ditches of the camp like cord wood. The episode closes with the soldier seeing the far less haughty woman struggling to lift a dead body that she and her Nazi brethren have passively allowed to dishonor. The danger zone is both physical ground and moral ground and that woman was deep into the moral danger zone from which there is no return.
Today I woke up with a classic good news, bad news reality. The good news was that I finally tested COVID negative after thirteen days of the junk. The truth is my symptoms were incredibly mild, presumably thanks to two vaccine and one booster shots. And to think, I not only have all these new antibodies, but I still have my second booster once appropriate time has passed. In 2022, that viral arena is still the number one danger zone we in most of America face, and I have waltzed through it relatively unscathed.
But the bad news was that I also woke up to a nasty gut ache the likes of which I cannot ever recall having. It was bad enough that I was looking up COVID-related maladies and things like pancreatitis. It didn’t stop me from meeting three of my business ethics students in La Jolla for a post-course gathering at their request. I skipped the food, but shared some Wall Street war stories as they asked me about this and that while the hoi polloi of La Jolla ate their expensive lunches. I made it through that danger zone today as well and think (too soon to say for sure) that I have again succeeded in wandering through the valley of danger with receding discomfort. What it has done is made me stick to rice and bland chicken for dinner, not wanting to risk a relapse. That reminds me that I am digesting the daily menu of a rice-eater rather than a Wall Street meat-eater. And I live in Paradise and must not let myself forget all those that live in less idyllic environs. We are none of us far from the danger zone at any moment in time.