Flags Of Our Fathers--Some Thoughts On Heroism, Friendship And Fatherhood

Clint Eastwoods film "Flags Of Our Fathers" is certainly worth watching. In its critical stance towards heroism it rivals and equally haunting German film, "Die Bruecke", directed by Bernhard Wicki.

I do not want to provide a summary of either movie here. Rather, I'd like to give a brief reflection on what Eastwood seems to think of as the central message of this work. The message is given twice, in the beginning and the end of the movie. Paraphrased it runs something like this:

We would like to think of war and the soldiers who fight it as heroes involved in some kind of heroic action. However, it is much more complicated. What is identified by bystanders as heroism is, for the individual soldier nothing but the friendship he feels for his fellow-soldier. Soldiers fight to protect each other from harm, not to commit heroic acts directed at the annihilation of the "enemy".

I find Eastwood's message courageous. Though I hesitate to say "heroic". While I'm not his friend, my hope is that his message is intended to protect me and my sons. Proactively protect us.

There is, however, a rather unsettling question that goes along with Eastwood's message.

The friendships of the soliders he portrays are all make-shift friendships (though not necessarily shallow). They didn't predate the war and they ended when the war ended. They were friendships of necessity, emergent from the fear of the nearing battles. They were friendships that came to be over a few card-games, a few shared cigarettes, an off-color joke or two and perhaps a shared moment of shared forgetfulness while listening to a few beats of music coming from the army ship's sound-system. But, essentially, these men are all lonely.

This loneliness is not bettered by references to each of their mothers and assumed girl-friends and fiancees. Rather, it's made worse by the loneliness and isolation from other men, from fathers, brothers, uncles and friends. Eastwood portrays all other men (those who are not involved in the actual fighting) as either estranged or perversely out to exploit the war for its heroic content. Those men become the seducers rather than the help-mates.

The question that haunts me is this: would these men who became soldiers and who "protected" each other--perhaps in an attempt to learn about real friendship between men--would they have chosen not to go to war had they been more strongly attached and connected to other men? Would real friendships, real conversations, real connections with other men have made the difference?

I am unsure if Eastwood wanted to go that far. Interestingly, the narrator of the story in the movie--the son of the main-character "Doc", a corpsman--doesn't know anything about his father's experiences until after his father passed away in old age. However, Eastwood shows a scene between father and adult son in the hospital. Moments before the father passes away, he worries "where is he". His son, assuming his father was missing one of his friends from the war, responds by saying

"Iggy, isn't here. He is dead."

But his father, in his last lucid moment, tells his son:

"I wasn't looking for him, I was looking for you. I worry I wasn't a good father to you. I'm sorry."

His son responds:

"You were the best father I could have wished for."

In an obvious gesture of abandonment of all stoicism rather than abandonment of each other, they half collapse half embrace each other crying, with the son's head coming to rest on his father's chest. A moving gesture of paternal nurturing and care (as opposed to the stereotypical handshake and perhaps a sentence that begins with the equally stereotypical words "Son, I'm proud of you . . .").

Eastwood is careful not to overstate the point. But it seems clear that this scene is meant to heal the wound of father absence. Often this wound continues to be passed on from father to son from one generation to the next. It is, perhaps, at the very root of all the loneliness men experience in their lives. It is the male wound most exploited by patriotism (the love for one's "patria" or fatherland ) for, under the guise of "heroism, it substitutes for the lost or absent father patterns of aggressive and self-destructive acts.

Is it possible that peace, "Pacifism", is intimately linked to the existence of deep and lasting nurturing connections between fathers and their sons?