I have a friend who is a National Guardsman, and we shared small talk at work over the course of many years. One day I asked him if he ever deployed to Iraq, as so many others in my state had. He went on to tell me how he would have been honored to but he never got the call. There was a hint of sadness in his voice I never forgot. In today’s post I’d like to look at The Longest Day, and the motivation that drives service.
This is part of an ongoing series on great war films and the lessons we can learn from them.
Setting: English Channel
June, 6. 1944
Early morning hours of D-Day
Before Adam Driver was Star Wars villain Kylo Ren, he was a U.S. Marine. An off duty injury left him at home while the rest of his unit deployed. Like my friend, and Roosevelt in the scene above, Driver wanted nothing more than to do the job he was trained for, whatever the outcome.
Going into a hard situation is difficult, but seeing the ones you love go into one without you is even harder, especially when obstacles are in the way. But if you want to get there, keep pushing on. You might need to argue your position to a superior. You might need to retrain to do something entirely new. Getting to that place might require a lot of hard work (it almost always does), and you still may not get there in the end, but it will always be worth the effort to give it everything you have. There are few things harder to live with than failure. One of them is regret.
Watch the full film on Amazon Prime Video.
Prior posts in this series:
Black Hawk Down
Gettysburg
Saving Private Ryan