At War with Ken Burns

My hitch with Ken Burns's army began in August of 2002. That summer was a strange time in America. The papers I read at breakfast were full of war talk and ceremonial grief. In New York plans were being made for the first anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center: there would be patriotic readings — the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence — and odes to the dead, and roses, and a marathon recitation of the names of all the victims. In Washington politicians were talking about a War on Terror, using the word war loosely and metaphorically — the way they used to talk about the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs — and President Bush was being briefed on how to stage a preemptive strike on Iraq. In Afghanistan American special forces were looking for Osama bin Laden. War was an oppressive presence, but it didn't seem real, more like a B-grade war movie. It would end after a while, the house lights would go up, and everybody would go home.

In the middle of all that unreality I was glad to get a letter from Lynn Novick, Ken Burns's coproducer. She and Ken were thinking about a PBS series about the American experience of the Second World War. Their planning had only begun, but they had two good working ideas to start with: they would build the film on the lives of ordinary people — the PFCs, not the generals — and they would include both the men who did the fighting and the folks who stayed home and worried. Would I like to join the company? It would be a relief, I thought, to escape from the fog of almost-war and go back in time to a real war. So I signed on.

More letters followed, explaining the project further, and setting a possible schedule. As they came, the intentions of the film seemed to expand; now it was to show "what the War meant then and means today and a great deal more." So there'd be two meanings, then and now, and more — though the letters didn't explain what that meant. The schedule would be leisurely; the first draft of the script wouldn't be finished until the fall of 2004. Editing would begin in 2007 or 2008. I liked that kind of planning: the film existed in an ideal state somewhere; but I wouldn't have to do any work for years.

The spacious plan didn't last long. By January 2003 the Burns staffers had found and interviewed some thirty people, scattered among four American towns, who remembered their war years; scriptwriting had begun, a first draft was expected in the fall of the year, and editing was now to begin in the spring of 2004. Nobody explained the acceleration, the sudden sense of urgency, if that's what it was.

The World War Two Film Project Board of Advisors (that's the title they gave us) met for the first time in New York in late February 2003. It was a very preliminary meeting, of all kinds of people — writers, editors, military historians, old veterans like me. And the Burns people — very bright and mostly very young, none of them old enough to have seen a serious war or to have lived through one, not even Vietnam. Together two or three generations of us shared what we remembered, or had discovered, and what we felt. By the end of the third day Ken and Lynn seemed confident that they knew enough to move on to the writing phase.

While we were meeting, the newspapers were full of a different war, the one that was in everyone's mind, but hadn't happened yet. The national mood, insofar as you would gauge it from the nineteenth floor of a building on Thirty-First Street, was edgy and uncertain; the air was full of lies and half-truths, of prevarications and mendacities and equivocations. The country seemed to have two options: to attack another country that was perhaps the wrong enemy, or to wait, anxiously and passively, for something worse to happen tomorrow or next week or maybe never.

But up on the nineteenth floor, the talk about our war was relaxed and easy. We knew how our story would run and how it would end. The good guys would win. And we knew for sure who the good guys were.

A few weeks later the war was in my morning Times:

BUSH ORDERS START OF WAR ON IRAQ; MISSILES APPARENTLY MISS HUSSEIN

So the president had the war he wanted, and he had missed his first target.

The Ken Burns war went on. Researchers looked for more witnesses and more archival film and more statistics. Somebody sent me the transcript of the interview I'd done back in February, and I read it and sent it back, along with some old photographs of the young pilot I once was, back in our war. And the script grew.

In May another Times headline appeared: "BUSH DECLARES 'ONE VICTORY IN WAR ON TERROR.'" I saw the whole show on the evening news. There he came, striding across the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Lincoln; behind him a banner hung from the bridge announcing "Mission Accomplished." The president was dressed in a Navy flight suit; a leather patch sewn on his chest had Navy wings stamped on it and "George W. Bush, Commander-in-Chief." That outfit made me sore. He had no right to be wearing Navy wings; he hadn't trained as a Navy pilot; he was Air Force, if he was anything. The whole performance made me uneasy; when was the last time an American president appeared dressed up in military clothes? And what comes next? A field marshal's uniform and a white horse? But it's all right: nobody takes him seriously, everybody laughs. There'll be no man on horseback in America, not any time soon.

In the fall (we're still in 2003) Lynn sends me the first draft of their fundraising proposal. The project has grown, both in length — it's now a five-part film, ten hours long — and in complexity of intention — now it's to be a "bottom up" exploration of the myriad ways in which World War II transformed our country, the war seen as a social force. The title has changed, too: it's no longer "The World War Two Film Project"; now it's simply "THE WAR." That's the way my generation has always thought of it; but what about younger people, who didn't grow up with it? Will they understand?

I respond to the draft a bit professorially. I object to the presence of high-velocity words like agony and horror and gargantuan and fantastic and colossal, and I am uncomfortable with sentences like this one: "Without sentimentality or nostalgia, the film will honor and celebrate the heroism, endurance, determination, sacrifice, and bravery of the generation of Americans who lived through it." Sentimentality and nostalgia — they'll be problems all right. Nostalgia, because when people my age look back at their war years they see their own youth, when they were free and full of life, excited by new places, new adventures, new skills, and new...