Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It's hard to believe that this series was produced by the same people who made the splendid Band of Brothers. Where Band shows the Americans as heroes and liberators, Pacific portrays the U.S. Marines as victims and dupes. Both programs led early on with a signature bit of heroism: the destruction of an artillery battery by a patrol led by Dick Winters and a night battle with some sort of vague heroics by John Basilone. While skillfully portraying the fog of war, Band of Brothers makes Winters' heroism very clear. It is never clear just what happens in Pacific. There is a night battle, tracers go flying back and forth and the next morning Basilone is declared a hero. This isn't a fluke. There is a deliberate attempt to downgrade the heroics of the the Americans. Of the three central characters in The Pacific, one is wounded, one is killed and one spends time in the looney bin. War is hell, of course, but World War II was a necessary war. Why treat the two theaters of war so differently? The answer, I think, has to do with the psthology of modern culture. Until the early eighties, except for the reasonable debate over the use of nuclear weapons, the war in the Pacific. like the war against the Nazis, managed to avoid the general disenchantment with war, no matter how necessary and virtuous. Then a few college professors who had spend far too long in the ivory tower and not enough time in the real world wrote books revealing their discovery that there was a racial element to the Pacific War and that the Americans treated the Japanese brutally (somehow the good professors missed the cause of that brutality, such minor items like the Rape of Nanking and the Bataan Death March). There matters stood until 1999, when President Clinton awarded 22 Medals of Honor to the Japanese American 442nd Regiment to redress what he called the racism of the US military against the Japanese. The award of these medals was absurd. The 442nd won two legitmate Medals of Honor during the war, a great record for a regiment which fought on a secondary front against third rate troops, was in action for less than a year and did not face any of the desperate actions that make generals hand out high honors. By contrrast, the entire Marine Corps, almost 100 times larger than an army regiment, which was in action virtually every day of the war, and fought crack troops in opposed landings and furious counterattacks, won only 84 Medals of Honor. At least some of the Medals which Clinton handed out didn't even pretend that they were awarded for anything above and beyond the call of duty. No matter. Clinton's point was to accuse the US military of racism against Japanese and he succeeded there. In the last decade, this effort to denigrate the Pacific War spread into popular culture with Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Father and Letters from Iwo Jima. Flags turned the heroism of Iwo Jima on its head and focused on the efforts of financiers to take advantage of the heroism of the Marines to sell war bonds. It was heroism as a capitalist tool. By contrast, Letters showed the battle from the Japanese viewpoint: men dying to protect their wives and families, dying for duty and honor. The Pacific extends this trend, including not just war as a way to sell bonds but showing the rest of the American effort as made up of victims. The reason for this is that the Baby Boomers are quite proud of their anti-war efforts, beginning in Vietnam (at least so long as they were still subject to the draft) and so on up to the present day. But this has resulted in horrible genocide around the world. More people of color have died in acts of genocide - in China, in Vietnam, in Cambodia, in Iraq, in Rwanda, in Darfur and now in North Africa - than died in the Shoah. Since the Baby Boomers like to think of themselves as virtuous, they need to denigrate the efforts of their forefathers to fight dictators. Hence programs like The Pacific. If you keep telling yourself that only fools and victims try to stop tyranny, you might be able to convince yourself that, contrary to Edmund Burke, all that is necessary for the triumph of liberalism is for good men to do nothing. Bunk, of course, but comforting bunk. But a curious side effect has occurred. You keep reading a lot of writers whose fathers or grandfathers won't talk to them about World War II. These writers conclude that these old heroes are too traumatized to talk about it. This is rubbish of course. If you are over fifty, you may have vivid memories of your pal's dads telling you about hand to hand combat with a Japanese soldier, about being a Jewish GI in a Nazi POW camp, about getting wounded, driving one of Patton's tanks, about Dunkirk and D-Day. And you get two old guys together and they immediately ask each other what they did in the war. Best of all, those of us who have come back from Iraq or Afghanistan know how these wonderful old men want to swap war stories with you. Suddenly, they aren't 90 any more. They are young and vital and the barriers of race, age, religion or ethnicity all fall away. So if you find these old vets clamming up, it has nothing to do with them and everything to do with you. They have found that you don't measure up and you don't deserve their memories. It means that they have determined that you have no sense of concepts like duty, honor, patriotism, standing up for the weak and willingness to fight evil no matter how strong. And if you wonder why these old heroes have determined that you're inadequate, The Pacific is as good an explanation as any.