SAVING SERGEANT WHITIE

 The other night I watched Saving Private Ryan. It was probably at least the twelfth time or so that I had seen it since my father’s death.

A week from next Monday will mark the twenty-first anniversary of Whitie’s passing. He died on January 15, 2003, aged eighty, after a four-year-long struggle with lung cancer. It’s hard for me to fathom that he has been gone that long. He was such a major influence in my life that it’s almost as if he’d never left.

Sergeant Technician "Whitie" Newland

I probably don’t mean that in the way that most people might think. I mean, yes, Whitie influenced me in some very positive ways by his own example of being honest, hard-working, and as good as his word. But his effect on me has been peculiar in very specific ways—for better or for worse, I guess you might say. My relationship with Whitie was never an easy one. I at first spent a lot of time trying to win his love, approval and pride in me, and then, a lot more time, later, trying to get over never having been able to. It took a long time to learn how to eschew his consistent criticism from every accomplishment I struggled to make, and to force myself to realize that I was worthy of unconditional love and respect, no matter how Whitie had made me feel growing up. That said, probably the greatest lesson he left me with, whether inadvertently or not, was that I was on my own. I was working the high wire without a net.

Despite that difficult relationship, I never stopped loving him or trying to win even the smallest approval from him. But it was only as a very mature man that I started to understand that a lot of what was broken in me stemmed from what was broken in him. The mistake in my early years was thinking that he was authoritative and infallible. It was only with age that I began to realize that we are all, in one way or another, broken children, who must learn to deal with the pain of our childhood wounds, and that while some of our inner children were less traumatized than others, we all struggled with our childhood insecurities. In that sense, I’m Whitie, and Whitie was me.

Spielberg's D-Day

Saving Private Ryan is a constant reminder of that fact. That motion picture has provided more of a connection between my father and me since his death than we were ever able to establish while he was alive. The reason is, that every time I watch that extraordinarily well-made film, I can only feel the deepest pain and empathy for my father during those three or so horrifyingly formative years of his young life, the bulk of which he spent in mortal combat in the European Theater of World War II.

Sgt. Whitie somewhere in France

There are particular scenes that are almost too poignant for me to bear. I find a lump forming in my throat and tears welling up in my eyes in spite of my every effort to maintain control of my emotions. It’s that there are certain characters and situations that painfully remind me of everything I’ve been able to piece together about Whitie’s War. About a time when my father wasn’t yet my father. When he was barely more than a boy who had to burst into manhood and take on responsibilities that were far beyond his years and experience. Three or so grueling years in which he traversed the terrible grinding tragedy of the last and most terrible part of the worst war in history, in which tens of millions died, and on a road along which he won four bronze stars and a commendation from the government of France, all honors we, his family, would never know about until his death.

I once wrote about how, shortly before my father died, my brother Dennis had brought him the video of Saving Private Ryan, thinking that it was something that might “entertain” Whitie, since he had actually “been there done that.” For a long time, the video cassette sat on top of the hardwood cabinet of the TV. Every once in a while my mother, Reba Mae, would ask when he planned to look at the movie Dennis had brought him. Whitie would say he’d get around to it.

"Pvt. Ryan" - authentic horrors of war 

Finally, one day while my mother was out shopping with her younger sister, Whitie popped the video recording into the cassette player and sat down to watch. When Reba Mae got home the box was still sitting open on top of the TV, the cassette was in the player, but the TV was off.

“Oh, so you finally watched that movie?” she asked.

“The first part,” Whitie said.

“What? You didn’t like it?”

“It’s not that,” he said. “It was just too much like it really was over there. I couldn’t keep watching.”

Having spent three years in the Army myself, but never having seen combat, my only experience with being under fire was infiltration and night patrol training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where our Airborne Ranger instructors subjected us to live machinegun and small arms fire, as well as carefully triggered explosions, to simulate, as closely as possible, what combat would be like if we were ever in a battlefield situation. It would have been easy for me to speculate, then, on viewing the movie, that Spielberg, king of the special effect, might have gone overboard in staging the horrific battle scenes. Whitie’s reaction to it made me realize, however, that Spielberg hadn’t. That, in fact, it was well-documented and as close to reality as he could make it.

Captain Miller and Sgt. Horvath (Hanks and Sizemore)

For those who have never seen the film, it opens in the midst of D-Day, June 6, 1944. We follow Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) and his second-in-command, Tech Sergeant Mike Horvath (Tom Sizemore) as they lead ashore their squad, attached to the Second Rangers Battalion, under impossibly heavy fire. Their mission, like that of all other landing parties, is to attempt to punch holes in the powerful German defenses, so as to provide a path for the invasion of Nazi occupied France.

The back story, meanwhile, reveals that two of the D-Day fatalities—not under Miller’s command— are brothers from the Ryan family of Iowa. In earlier action, a third of the four Ryan brothers has been killed in action in New Guinea. When Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall is made aware that these boys’ mother will be receiving simultaneous notifications of the deaths of three of her four sons, he orders that a detail of men carry out an urgent search, with the mission of finding Mrs. Ryan’s fourth son, Private James Ryan of the One Hundred First Airborne, and getting him out of harm’s way. The rest of the movie deals with the ultimate sacrifices that Miller and his men will face in accomplishing that mission, and the reluctance of Private Ryan to be saved, which would mean turning his back on the only brothers his has left—his comrades in arms.

The fear that the movie portrays, particularly in the opening D-Day scene, is suffocating. You can almost smell it. The amount of fire from the Germans being taken by the massive landing parties is withering. And it is a little like shooting fish in a barrel, since the Nazis are well dug-in with concrete gun emplacements established along the shore. The surf is running red with the blood of Allied soldiers who fail to make it off of the landing craft and to get to cover on shore before becoming casualties. In real life, more than four thousand four hundred Allied troops died in the D-Day landing. Well over half of them were Americans. That was more fatalities in a single day than either the Union (3,155) or the Confederacy (3,903) lost in three days of bloody fighting at Gettysburg.

The fortifications that the Allied beach assault troops faced as they poured from jammed-packed amphibious landing craft and tried to wade ashore without being shot or blown up, were incredibly formidable. The erection of them was ordered directly by Hitler, and, as a whole, they were known as "the Atlantic Wall". They were veritably cyclopean in terms of their extension, stretching some two thousand miles along the European coast, and were built specifically to stymie an Allied invasion. In accordance with Hitler’s Directive No. 40, they included innumerable gun emplacements, some five million land and sea mines, rows upon rows of so-called “Czech hedgehogs”—those strange X-shaped metal things strewn along the Normandy coast—as well as bunkers and fortresses manned by thousands of German troops. 

Spielberg very aptly demonstrates how impossibly difficult the landing was and how determined the Germans were to halt it. He reportedly spent eleven million dollars—which seems like a paltry sum today, a quarter-century later—and used a thousand extras to recreate the landing on a concentrated area of beach. He even hired amputees to pose as soldiers with limbs blown off, and obviously compiled a great deal of military advice and intelligence in order to successfully pull it off. It worked.

A lighter moment and a bit of 
sparring on the front lines in Europe

Long after hearing my father’s take on it, I read the observations of a vet from my own time. In 2019, the Vietnam era Army veteran wrote in a brief review of the film, “Fictional, yes, but combat authenticity was genuinely real. Twenty-one years ago this movie was released and I finally watched it in 2019. I really struggled to watch and I cried and I wept through most of the movie. I did two tours in Nam. This movie was like being back in country. I will never watch it again. It just eats my guts out.”

This couldn’t help but remind me of friends of mine who, less lucky than myself, endured the battlefield hell of the Vietnam War while I was assigned to NATO forces in Europe. A cousin who was as close as a brother to me, and who managed to come back but left part of himself, for life, back on the Southeast Asian battleground. A friend who joined the Army so young that by age nineteen, he was already a staff sergeant, leading squads of men in firefights in the rice paddies and jungles of Vietnam. Another friend who, tragically, came home in a box and whose funeral I attended in uniform, just after completing my basic combat training. The many posthumous awards ceremonies I played for in my time with the Seventy-Second Army Band at Fort MacArthur in Los Angeles.

Whitie in camp, somewhere in the European Theater

I remembered too, when I was stationed in Germany and Whitie came to visit. I asked what he was thinking as we drove along the Autobahn from Frankfurt to Kaiserslautern, because he seemed so pensive and uncharacteristically quiet. He said he was thinking that he’d seen a lot of this before. That he had crawled over much of it.

Whitie always downplayed his role, claimed he “didn’t do much” and “wasn’t part of the first wave.” As far as I can tell, from poring over the history of the outfits he served with, he was elsewhere in Europe and didn’t form part of the troops that took part in the initial D-Day landing. But he was indeed one of the thousands of soldiers who would take part in the Southern France landing that would come two months later in August of 1944. And from there he would be involved in the swift and massive push northward with the Seventh Army that would eventually contribute to the definitive defeat of Nazi Germany. This all happened within the context of Operation Dragoon, in which, over the course of a month of initial fighting, seventeen thousand Allied troops would be killed, while seven thousand of the enemy would die, ten thousand would be wounded, and another one hundred thirty thousand would be captured.

Throughout all of this and until the end of the war, Whitie would be a buck sergeant technician in charge of a nine-man demolition squad that would follow armored and infantry into the worst battle zones in the European Theater. Saving Private Ryan never ceases to make me keenly aware of precisely what that sort of commitment and sacrifice signify.

It’s all of these things and more that Saving Private Ryan brings home to me every time I see it. So it is no more “entertainment” to me than it would have been for Whitie. It is, instead, a heart-rending lesson, a learning process that helps me understand my unreadable father better—a graphic glimpse into the horrors of his youth, and those of so many other young men like himself, in his generation and my own, who lost their innocence and earned a lifetime of trauma on the battlefield.