The opening scene from the movie Saving Private Ryan is horrific. Spielberg meant it to be. It shows the awful truth of war.
The viewer is in a small landing craft packed with men approaching the Normandy coast on D-Day. One man leans over and vomits. All of them look serious, worried, scared. Someone yells out to get ready and the heavy steel door drops into the water.
Freeze the frame.
One of the young men in the front row of the boat was eighteen. It wasn’t so long ago he was a tiny baby, the absolute joy of his parents’ lives. He learned to crawl, then to walk, then to talk. He got sick and his mom sat up with him at night and nursed him back to health. He showed up for his first day of school, scared and unsure. School was fun and he worked hard on his studies. He was good at math and one of the teachers sat down with him and suggested he may go on to university some day.
A girl caught his eye and they went on a date. He got up the courage to ask her to prom and she said yes. The picture of him in his suit, with his date on his arm, is on the family mantle. He’s smiling, happy, with his whole life ahead of him.
Then the war happened. He enlisted the moment he was of age and started basic training. It was hell. The drill sergeant ran the new guys ragged. They crawled through mud with live fire inches over their helmets. They dug into foxholes and slept in wet clothes. They learned to strip down their rifle, clean it and be ready to fire in minutes. They spent months getting ready to kill.
The word came down that they were shipping out. He was lucky and got a quick visit with his parents before he left. His mother stood on the platform, tears in her eyes as he assured her he would remember to duck. Then the train left and he was gone.
Play the movie.
The steel door dropped into the surf and a machine gun in a pillbox on the French coastline opened fire. The high-caliber slugs tore into the men in the front row and they were dead on their feet. Their bodies fell forward into the churning water and the men behind them took the next round of bullets. They fell and so did the men behind them. Then a few soldiers managed to clamor over the pile of bodies and jump into the water. Most of them were hit and sunk into the ocean. A few made it to the beach, where artillery and bullets continued slamming down.
That…is the truth of war. Spielberg gave it to us, frame by frame.
But it’s what is behind that moment that’s so shocking. Every one of the men who died on that beach that day had a family who loved him, maybe even a girl to go home to. They had a life to live, and that got torn from them.
This is what goes through my head when I have to kill someone in my books. I write thrillers, and homicide is a big part of what all three of my series deal with. Murder, to me, is the ultimate crime. The bad guys deserve to get caught.
I write thrillers, but I don’t like killing people.
