Jules Crittenden emails:

Meet John Eade

You may know him from Mudville, where his story has appeared before. If you don't know him yet, you'll want to meet John Eade, survivor of the Ia Drang, and hear what he has to say about Thermopylae and standing your ground.

Four Years In. 300? It's Just a Movie.
Jules Crittenden

John Eade hasn’t seen a war movie in more than 40 years, but he’s thinking about seeing “300.” I kind of get that. There is something about the Spartans’ simple illogical willingness to die at Thermopylae that I suspect speaks across the centuries to a lot of combat veterans. It is possible to understand how glad they felt about the opportunity that presented itself. But it’s the kind of thing that, if you try to discuss it with people who haven’t experienced it, places you at risk of being considered seriously disturbed.

I still watch war movies, looking for the ones that do it well as a technical matter, though real war ruined war movies for me. Even in the best, a written, acted script is vaguely offensive, that people who have never done this should attempt to dramatize it. There are maybe a handful that come close to capturing the strange normality of extraordinary events, when death and valor are common, unsurprising occurrences.

Images and dialogue will never convey things like the feeling of lying awake before dawn, when fear shoves its way up and down your esophagus like a fat, filthy rat; or the subdued euphoric feeling as the assault gets underway and you are ready to die; or the laughter in the midst of combat; or the inexplicable sadness over the death of someone who would have killed you. The emotions and shock movies try to portray are so often the stock ones, and the wrong ones.

Some movies come close, but struggle to deliver even a small piece of what someone like Eade can convey in a few spoken words. It isn’t the words, it is that thing his words carry, something almost imperceptible that comes across between the words, if you are able to recognize it. Within its embrace, it becomes completely logical that one should desire, in the company of 299 comrades, to face 250,000 Persians and die.

Eade is in a class with those Spartans. ...

Eade, now in his 60s, with broken body, is still a soldier. As Eade and I talked about Thermopylae the other night, we talked about the fact that for combat veterans, it is not ancient history. Eade knows what the Spartans knew. ...

Read the whole thing.

Contributed by Bill Faith on March 19, 2007 at 02:57 AM in The American Warrior, US Army, Viet Nam | Permalink

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