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First of all, about the show itself:  Gettysburg takes us through the three-day battle starting us at around 9:00am on July 1, 1863 and then focuses on several key moments throughout the see-saw fighting that would ravage the town and the surrounding countryside, leaving 55,000 casualties in its wake.  It follows several men on the front lines, from foot soldiers to generals.  Some live, some die.  Each has a story to tell and we see the raw terror mixed with unimaginable bravery that such battles summoned.  It also shows the ghastly wounds that were a horrible consequence of modern weapons meeting outdated line tactics of the day. The program is also quite effective at showing this to be a savage affair (including a graphic depiction of a Union soldier splitting a rebel’s skull with his rifle butt that had me cringing.)  If Gettysburg’s purpose was, as the History Channel’s website announces, to “strip away the romanticized veneer of the Civil War to present the pivotal Battle of Gettysburg in a new light—a visceral, terrifying and deeply personal experience” then it does the job.

There were, however, disappointments that I really didn’t expect.  First is the heavy reliance on re-enactors despite the liberating aspect of modern CGI.  (Perhaps budgetary constraints were in play here).  Re-enactors are great for replaying tiny segments of the battle, and the consultants must have paid particular attention to the grime and filth, even the tattered uniforms, so prevalent among un-bathed Civil War soldiers in the field.  But like the Turner feature film of the same name almost two decades earlier, the numerical limits of available play-actors means that these depictions are hopelessly under-populated.  According to the June 30 rolls, a combined 185,000 soldiers (105,000 Union, 80,000 Confederate) were in the area.  This means that massive infantry formations and rows of artillery lined hub-to-hub were engaged.  For example, the Confederate line of battle that assaulted the Union position on Herr’s Ridge at the very beginning of the still-developing fight was almost a mile wide.  (And that was just two brigades.  Three to five brigades made up a Confederate division, three divisions a corps, three corps made up the Army of Northern Virginia).  Indeed, Gettysburg was one of the few open field battles where entire mass formations were in plain view at once creating what one Alabama soldier described as “a grand panorama with the sounds of conflict added.”

Considering the Scotts’ involvement I was expecting more CGI to be employed so we could actually see, for instance, what the rebel force of 12,000 men arrayed for battle in their doomed July 3 assault must have looked like from the Union lines a mile away. Union Lieutenant Frank Haskel stood in awe on Cemetery Ridge as the enemy approached, describing it as “an overwhelming, resistless tide of an ocean of armed men sweeping upon us!”  The personal angle of the documentary does create intense drama and poignant emotion, but it fails to impress upon the viewer the sheer enormity of this titanic battle that was the greatest ever fought in the Western Hemisphere.

I also tried to imagine watching Gettysburg from the perspective of one unfamiliar with the battle and I think I would have found it confusing.  For instance, there was little back-story explaining why Lee invaded the North in the first place, what the stakes were (other than they were “high”), or why they ended up fighting at Gettysburg despite the fact that neither Lee nor Meade chose the field (other than a brief allusion to the roads coming together there).  Why were Lee’s plans upset?  Why had Meade only been in command for four days?  What caused the Union retreat on day one when it starts off depicting the victorious charge to the railroad cut by Rufus Dawes’ 6^th Wisconsin?  Also why focus just on Mississippi brigadier William Barksdale on the southern flank on July 2 (the bloodiest of the three days) without better explaining where he fit into the plan of attack?  Brave as he was, Barksdale was one brigade commander in an assault that employed twelve brigades.  Honestly, if I didn’t know the battle, I would have been at a loss as to the big picture.   It‘s almost as if the producers and historians, so caught up in enthusiasm for the project, forgot that most people don’t know the story of the battle in depth and could have used a general tutorial to go along with the individual experiences.  (They might have taken a page from the 1970s British WW2 television series The World At War which perfectly balances strategic/tactical overviews with personal narratives).

Finally, the music really annoyed me after a while.  It was the same sort of soundtrack one hears in those cable channel ghost story documentaries. Really.

Yeah, yeah maybe I’m nit-picking.  And who I am to second-guess such noted historian contributors as James McPherson (Battle Cry Of Freedom) and others?   But I call ‘em like I see ‘em. Gettysburg certainly does a remarkable job giving us a front row seat at North America’s biggest clash of arms and kudos on that score.  But if I didn’t already know the details of the battle, I would have come away thoroughly entertained but not necessarily educated.

Those rows of white tombstones decorated with little flags are the reason Americans don’t walk downtown, past the ruins where the synagogue once stood, to grab a schnitzel und ein bier from that little imbiss next to der bahnhof.  They are why there isn’t a smoking pit in the heart of Los Angeles where the Library Tower used to be.

Violence never solves anything, war is not the answer, arms are for hugging….  It’s hard to believe that there are adults out there that actually buy into such foolishness.

Memorial Day is about men and women who didn’t orient their lives to the dictates of poorly thought-through bumper sticker clichés that belong on the rear of some NPR-listening public school administrator’s Prius.  It’s about men and women who understood that sometimes doing the right thing means doing the hardest thing.

Violence can solve things.  Hitler – solved.  Tojo – solved.  Saddam – solved.  Sometimes it takes time:  Bin Laden – solution pending.  But all the earnest teach-ins and doofy drum circles in the world haven’t kept one Darfurian from being killed by the janjaweed Islamist militia.  The only thing that will ever do that is a division of Marines; until the activists call for the Devil Dogs to go in, they’re just posing.

Frequently, war is the answer.  With the sorry state of history education in America, it’s easy to see how some people could embrace the delusion that there is nothing worth fighting for.  But the Nazi concentration camps didn’t liberate themselves.  Bosnia and Kosovo’s ethnic cleansing didn’t end because Milosevic got a pretty please with sugar on top.  And the Taliban aren’t about to see the light and stop throwing acid in schoolgirl’s faces for the crime of wanting to learn to read. 

War and violence aren’t the only answers – I worked in civil affairs on one deployment and we made a huge difference without firing a shot.  Sometimes American soldiers’ arms are for hugging – I’ve seen that too – but before you can build a peace you have to enforce security.  That means a grunt standing watch, M4 in hand, with a pilot in an F-15 overhead and a destroyer off-shore.

What is ironic is that Hollywood, for all its superficial peacenik posing, gets it.  The messages of two of the biggest movies out right now, Star Trek and Terminator Salvation, are that there are things worth fighting for and dying for.  Sadly, Hollywood feels the need to cloak that truth in the guise of battles against pointy-eared space aliens and death-dealing cyborgs that look like our governor. 

Hollywood, just lose the metaphors.  It would be nice to see a straight-up movie about the sacrifices of American soldiers in the War on Terror that doesn’t replace jihadi psychos with Romulans or SkyNet. 

Memorial Day is the perfect occasion to embrace the truth.  Do not listen to those who say that it is just another day off where people do nothing but drink beer and eat barbecue with their buddies.  That’s a strawman offered up by the bumper sticker set because they fear Memorial Day’s true meaning.   

At the risk of being presumptuous, those who gave their lives for our country would want you to gather your buddies and drink beers and eat barbecue (Resolved:  Barbecued beef ribs are superior in every way to pork ribs.  Discuss.).   I plan to.  There is a reason that on Memorial Day the flag flies at half-staff only until noon, when it is raised to the top of the pole again.  It symbolizes that we honor our dead by going forward with our lives.

Honor our fallen by remembering them, and just as importantly, what they did.  We can do that best by confronting the nonsense that surrounds us by telling the stories of these brave American men and women.  When little Jimmy comes home confused because the teacher said that America is irremediably racist, you tell him about the Union soldiers who fell at Gettysburg.  When your daughter tells you her textbook says that World War II was really instigated by war profiteers, pop in the disc of the Band of Brothers episode where Easy Company stumbles onto a Nazi death camp.  When your son asks what that bumper sticker saying “End the War” means, you tell him about what the cops and firefighters had to do on 9/11.  Let the truth be your tribute.