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Review by
KEVIN MILLER

—Comment on te blog

If you’ve never read Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides and you’re even slightly interested in World War II history, get your hands on a copy. And after that, get yourself to this movie. While The Great Raid hardly compares to Sides’ harrowing account of life at the notorious Cabanatuan Japanese POW camp in the Philippines or the daring rescue of the 511 American soldiers imprisoned there; after reading Sides’ book, you won’t be able to resist seeing even a simplified version of events on screen. This is not to say The Great Raid is a bad film—far from it. It just isn’t a great film. It includes all of the main characters and events. What’s missing are the extensive details and the riveting narrative that make Ghost Soldiers so compelling.

Part of the problem is an issue of balance. There are actually three stories going on in this film. The first has to do with the prisoners themselves. After enduring the Bataan Death March—a 100-kilometer trek across the Philippines’ Bataan Peninsula, during which approximately 20,000 soldiers died—the survivors faced three years of ruthless treatment at the hands of their Japanese captors. Disease, starvation, and physical abuse took an incredible toll on the men. Even more would have died were it not for the Filipino resistance fighters who ran an underground smuggling ring that delivered medicine and other supplies to the POWs—comprising the film’s second storyline. The third story, of course, involves Colonel Henry Mucci and the 120 members of the 6th Ranger Battalion whose daring rescue mission freed the surviving prisoners and is still regarded as the most successful rescue effort in US military history.

A story told from any one of these three viewpoints would make a compelling movie in and of itself. Including two of the stories may also have worked, as long as one was the main plot and the other a mere sub-plot. But attempting to give equal airtime to all three stories—as this movie tries to do—can do justice to none of them, unless you turned the whole thing into a six-hour miniseries. Unfortunately, in this case the storyline that suffers most is potentially the most compelling—that of Colonel Mucci and his men. Without the background details, it’s difficult to grasp the enormity of their undertaking and the absolutely miraculous result.

As amazing as this rescue effort was, all of the emotion and pyrotechnics it stirs up tend to obscure the true cost of the liberation, something this film hints at only once. No, it isn’t afterwards when the Rangers discover their lone fatality. It actually happens right before the raid begins. Sides’ book probably brings this out a little better than the film, but what I’m talking about is the Ranger assigned the task of firing the first shot, which would then kick off the attack. For approximately one hour, he lay in a trench not fifty yards away from the Japanese sentry who was doomed to become the first casualty in this battle. From his vantage point, the Ranger could see the sentry clearly as he paced back and forth, smoked a cigarette, and stared out at the darkness, completely oblivious to the fact that he was enjoying his final hour on Earth. For that brief period, the enemy—at least this particular enemy—became something more than an evil construct that could be dispatched without the slightest twinge of conscience. For that moment, in the eyes of this Ranger, the enemy became a human being. Suddenly realizing the full gravity of what he was about to do, he could barely bring himself to pull the trigger when the time came, delaying the raid by several minutes. He knew his efforts would probably save the lives of hundreds of American POWs, but the end result would be approximately 150 Japanese soldiers lying dead in the dust. Even though the Ranger knew of all the terrible things the Japanese soldiers had done to his compatriots, when he got right down to it, he realized the Japanese were still men—fathers, brothers, and sons—just like him, and just like the American and British soldiers they had imprisoned and abused. As my friend said on the way out of the theater, “War is a no-win proposition.” For that brief moment, I think this Ranger couldn’t have agreed more.

Humanizing the enemy is a big no-no when it comes to war. In fact, most military training is designed to suppress or destroy a soldier’s tendency to do just that. After all, if an army is to be successful, it can’t have its soldiers wading through moral dilemmas each time they go to pull the trigger. They must be conditioned to pull the trigger without a second thought and without regret. This is the harsh reality of war.

At the same time though, I can’t help but think that as long as we continue to dehumanize the enemy and teach people at the forefront of our foreign policy enforcement efforts to do the same, we will never appreciate sheer beauty and sanctity of human life, whether in others or ourselves. I fear that we will never experience peace and security either, because if we—the self-appointed “good guys”—are able to reduce our enemies into something less than human, imagine how the so-called “bad guys” conceptualize us! Yes, many people in the world do terrible things—as do each of us in our darkest and most private moments. But does that place them beyond redemption and worthy of extermination? If you answer, “yes” to that question, then you also place yourself in a precarious position, because perhaps your own secret sin puts you beyond redemption as well. After all, who but God knows where the line is and when you cross it?

Perhaps that’s why Christ taught us to love our enemies rather than hate them, to do good to those who hurt us rather than return evil for evil. This isn’t some arbitrary moral imperative designed to make us feel guilty. It is a matter of survival, but, even more than that, it is the means by which we might one day become fully human ourselves.

—Comment on te blog

 

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