Rocky bought this and we watched part one and two last night. He was sharing stories from his uncles (most were European theater though, but Rocky's very well-read on the 2WW generally). The Pacific is factual.
As a kid I was fascinated by The War, and all war stuff generally (go figure). I distinctly recall being creeped out by the pictures of the Pacific theater; the dense jungle of the tropics; the imagined (and sometimes mentioned) huge and pernicious bugs, spiders, snakes; the rot, disease, humidity; the hidden enemy inside the growth of jungle flora that hid everything a few feet away; too much water too little land; too much rain, etc. and etc. It creeped me out: Europe made much more sense.
I went into this film tribute to the American veterans of WW2 with that emotional base still very fresh in my mind.
First it was Saving Private Ryan; then Band of Brothers; now The Pacific. Almost like a trilogy of film monuments. Each time (this time is still on-going of course), I am affected the same way: I am dumbfounded that the Baby Boomer generation thinks that their Fathers are/were sane. How did they raise us with the horrors of war embeded in their minds for the rest of their lives? In my experience, none of the vets I knew talked about any of it with their kids' generation. Perhaps, as Rocky experienced as a teen, a father or uncle would come to us and warn us: like Sledge's physician veteran father did: "The war didn't just tear their bodies; it tore their souls out of them. If you return to us and I can no longer see the light in your eyes; if the love of life is no longer there, it will break my heart". But I never contemplated the military as a career choice, so nobody every said anything to me. All those dads and uncles and neighbors stayed silent as the tomb. Just having Spielberg and Hanks and Company portray it in film this long afterward is enough for me. The tears of memory of all those veterans were shed in private and in silence, hidden away from their children: they kept the world we grew up in clean as possible from violence and horror. This is true of the fathers and their wives, our mothers, everywhere on the planet. So I am grateful to the makers of these films for paying tribute to the silent, secret sacrifice and pain that they have born for a lifetime to see that their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren have a better, safer, saner world.
The scene near the end of part two illuminates this best: the mess orderly gives the four survivors coffee and watches them sipping it like a sacrament. He hesitatingly says, "I guess it was pretty bad here, huh?" (words to that effect, a paraphrase) None of them say anything and he turns to leave. One of the veterans of Guadalcanal asks: "Who told you? Nobody knows about this place". The orderly says: "Everybody knows about Guadalcanal. The First Marines are on the front of every newspaper in America. You're heros". The four veterans look at each other in dumb amazement….
