‘War’ tells stories too long untold

For the past few weeks, my husband and I were caught up in ‘The War,” documentarian Ken Burns’ most recent gift to television viewers.

We have consistently chosen episodes of this series over our usual favorites “Dancing With the Stars,” baseball, football and prime-time-ratings winners such as “Desperate Housewives” and “Ugly Betty.”

When I first heard about this series, I thought it was more of what we often find on the History Channel or in episodes of “Band of Brothers.” Not to my viewing taste when the new fall season of TV was premiering.

How wrong I was.

What changed my mind was an interview on public radio in which Ken Burns and his co-producer, Lynn Novick, described the premise of this six-year-long project and some of the people who’d told their stories.

I was born in 1938, too young to know much about the war except that I had nine aunts and uncles serving in the armed forces.

When I took the train to my grandparents’ farm in Colorado, the cars were jammed with men in uniform. There were pink ribbons on the lamb chops on my dinner plate and a soldier teased me. “Save it for your hair, kiddo.”

I did not know that American families, including children my age, were among the hundreds of civilians in a prisoner of war camp in the Philippines existing on a daily diet of less food than the scraps I left on my plate that night on the train.

It’s funny, the things we remember that aren’t really important at all.

We ate beans a lot because meat was rationed. There was no butter for my toast, only a new thing called margarine that was white until you squeezed the color pill into it so the stuff took on a butterlike appearance. Worse yet, no sugar for my Wheaties.

My father, crippled by polio, did not go to war, but all his brothers did. We prayed for them. My grandmother cried as weeks went by without letters. Then one or two would get through and she’d read them over and over.

When my aunts and uncles came home, they didn’t talk about their experiences. Not even the wounds that changed their bodies were mentioned. Maybe I was still too young too hear about such things.

I knew my Aunt Alice, who served in the Women’s Army Corps, married a Hungarian resistance fighter who’d joined the American forces as they swept through Europe toward Germany. Aunt Alice’s husband told me he’d once met the famous actress Zsa Zsa Gabor and her sister, Ava.

He was gentle man who fixed washing machines and took good care of his wife and daughters. He rarely spoke of his childhood in Hungary, probably because memories of his family’s suffering were too painful to think of even decades later.

Yet it is just such stories this documentary tells so eloquently: the stories of ordinary people caught up in the horror of a world war that killed millions of men, women and children.

As we’ve watched this series, I realize how little I really knew about that time in our country’s history.

To frame his work, Burns and his team selected four American cities and began interviewing families and World War II veterans more than six years ago. From hundreds of interviews and research in this nation’s historical film archives came the stories of several families that are at the core of this production, which runs nearly 16 hours spread over seven episodes.

Those of us old enough to have any memories know that World War II “touched every family, in every home on every street in every town in America,” as Burns says, “demonstrating that in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives.”

In a letter to viewers I found on the Web site for this series, Burns quotes reporter Eric Sevareid, a radio correspondent trying to explain the unexplainable:

“Only the soldier really lives the war. The journalist does not. War happens inside a man and that is why, in a certain sense you and your sons from war will be forever strangers. If, by the miracles of art and genius, in later years two or three of them can open their hearts and the right words come, then perhaps we shall all know a little of what it was like.”

For some of those whose voices and words are heard in this series, it has taken more than a half-century to speak. But, as Sevareid predicted, we have the opportunity to learn a little of what it was truly like.

If you’ve missed this series, check your listings because it will be repeated.

Watch it. Remember. Honor those who were there for us.

Honor those who serve today.

I have the soundtrack from this production on the CD player in my car. It begins with “American Anthem,” sung by Norah Jones. In the lyrics, there is a phrase that speaks of knowing as you come to the end of your life that you’ve given your best to the country that gave its best to you.

I think about those words a lot these days. We all should.

Linda Bryant Smith writes about life as a senior citizen and the issues that concern, annoy and often irritate the heck out of her now that she lives in a world where nothing is ever truly fixed but her income. You can e-mail her at ljbryantsmith@yahoo.com.