BY MARGARET A. McGURK
The Cincinnati Enquirer
CHICAGO -- Stephen E. Ambrose was the first person after Steven Spielberg to see Saving Private Ryan. The director wanted the historian, then working with the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, to assess the movie's accuracy. A print was flown to Louisiana for a one-man screening.
"There were all these cops outside to make sure nobody but me saw it," he recalled. "So I go in and I'm sitting in this thousand-seat theater. . . . After the first 25-minute sequence, I yelled up to the projectionist "Cut!'
"He did, and he came out of the booth all worried. "What's the matter?'
"I said, "I gotta catch my breath,' " Mr. Ambrose throws himself back in his chair, hand over his chest, remembering what he felt. "I had seen on the screen what I have been hearing from veterans for 25 years about what happened there, and I never thought I would ever see it on screen, ever. And I had. And I was just shaking."
Mr. Ambrose, the best-selling author of Undaunted Courage about the Lewis and Clark expedition, probably knows as much about the D-Day invasion as any historian in the country. He helped edit the military papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who commanded the Allied forces in Europe.
Mr. Ambrose has written six books about Mr. Eisenhower, and several others about the war. The most popular were D-Day: The Climactic Battle of World War II in 1994 and Citizen Soldiers in 1997, drawn from the vast collection of oral histories at the Eisenhower Center.
Recently retired from teaching at the University of Montana in Helena, the plain-spoken historian said he never so much as visited the Private Ryan movie set, nor did he work on the script by Robert Rodat.
"I'm the historical consultant for this movie because they read my books," he said. "I'm the conduit. I'm the guy that went out and interviewed all the veterans."
He said the movie left him "bowled over."
"It's the best war movie ever made," he said. "I think it's a work of genius. I think it's the most honest war movie I've ever seen, and I've seen most of 'em."
For example, he said, "In all the others I've seen, when a GI gets shot, he's dead or very slightly wounded. . . . And the (commanding officer) can write home to the grieving parents or the widow, he didn't know what hit him. He didn't suffer."
"That happens in war about 1 percent of the time; 99 percent of the time, they damn well do know what hit 'em, and they sure as hell are suffering. They're suffering terribly. They're in great physical pain and they're watching themselves die. . . . When the medic gets up to them and they want water and they want mother and they want a cigarette and they want morphine. . . . They're in terror. They haven't made peace with their maker. They're dying in combat. And that's what happens in war and that's what Spielberg makes you look at."
He also said that the movie GIs, like their real-life models, didn't talk much about nobility or the higher purpose of the war. "In the English language, the single most powerful and best word is love. The second best is wife. The third best is home. And to get home, these guys had to go do a job first."
Veterans finally talking
Chaos, anger, overwhelming noise -- all are battle details he said Private Ryan depicts exactly as described by survivors. Likewise, the movie used veterans' accounts of Americans shooting German soldiers who tried to surrender.
He said the 50th anniversary of the war has moved many vets to begin telling their families about experiences they kept to themselves. For his own part, Mr. Ambrose has written his last war story.
"I promised my wife, when I sent in the script for Citizen Soldiers, I ain't gonna study war no more. . . . This isn't easy writing this stuff up. I've got tears rolling down my face at the computer sometimes when I'm talking about Company A in the 116th (Regiment) wiped out in the first minute. And I've got the story from guys who lived only because they got wounded and a dead guy landed on top of them. You can't write that stuff up and not be wrenched by it."
He even donated his 3,000-volume library of WWII books to the Eisenhower Center, he said.
Now he's working on a book about the first transcontinental railroad.
"I feel very much like the GIs from WWII," said Mr. Ambrose, whose own military service came during the Cold War. "They came home and they'd seen enough blood to last them a lifetime. They never wanted to see a high explosive go off again, and they wanted to build.
"They went to college on the GI bill and then they went out and they built the interstate highway system, and they built the modern suburbs and they built the great medical establishment of the United States and they built this fabulous higher education system we've got. They were a great generation of builders."
That, he said, is the unexpected lesson learned by students who told him after classes on World War II, "It never occurred to me there could be positive things about war. It never occurred to me there were wars that had to be fought."
As for why World War II holds such fascination these days, he said, "We live in an unheroic age. We live in an age that doesn't require heroism. . . . We're into an age when the political reporters are concerned about what Bill and Monica did and didn't do. These are not great issues.
"People still want heroes and Capt. Miller (in Private Ryan) is the genuine article. This is the ordinary guy . . . who got caught up in extraordinary times and demands were made of him and his generation that were unique to them."
His expectation is that Saving Private Ryan will help instill that lesson.
"I think a hundred years from now," he said, "when the American people want to see what WWII was like, this is the film they'll see."
