Fury

I have just seen the movie Fury, and I want to record my reaction while it's still fresh in my mind.

*WARNING: May contain minor spoilers*

This movie interested me for a couple of reasons: 1. a movie about WWII tank battalions has never really been done before, and 2. my grandfather was a member of the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion, receiving both a purple heart and a bronze star for his service.

My first reaction upon the denouement of Fury was thinking how it presents the sheer irony of war. Watching this movie feels the way reading an Ernest Hemingway novel feels, if that makes any sense. I'm thinking of The Sun Also Rises in particular. You are told to go against what you believe in and commit great sins--murder of fellow human beings among them--for a just cause: the defense of human life. You are made to feel emasculated if you do not spit upon your enemies and curse them--and yet, to them, YOU are the enemy. You are assured by superiors that you are doing the right thing, when every instinct of conscience screams the opposite.

At several points in the movie, the characters will quote bits of Scripture in an effort to convince themselves that God is on their side and what they are doing is justified. It is incredibly apparent that if they do not succeed in convincing themselves of this, they will not be able to go on. On one occasion someone asks, "Hey, do you think God loves Hitler?" It is said as a joke, but one with an underlying earnestness. The subtext asks what they dare not say: if God really does love Hitler, and God's supposed to love us too, then what are we doing here? How can this possibly be right?

Perhaps the greatest irony of all comes at the end of the film, when the youngest member of the tank, really no more than a boy, is the sole survivor of what is essentially a massacre. He is told to go through the bottom hatch of the tank and hide underneath by the last dying member of his tanker, which he does. He is discovered by an equally young German soldier, who does not shoot him. The following morning, he climbs back into the tank to lay his jacket over his dead friend's face. He is discovered by another American battalion. As the medics lead him away to a truck, one says, "Hey kid, you're a hero! You know that?" You can see the irony written all over the young man's face. He doesn't think he's a hero. He didn't stay inside to die with his companions. He hid. The survivor's guilt is overwhelming as he sits there thinking how he should have just kept shooting at the Germans until they killed him, too. The real heroes were those men who died in the tank, who were left behind.

Movies like this also help us, perhaps, to have an inkling of what a soldier might feel upon returning from war. Everyday life must seem so trivial to them, so difficult to reconcile with the horror they've endured. They have witnessed the truly awful things human beings can do to one another.

Please, pray for our troops. Pray that they do not lose hope or faith. Pray that they may continue to find the strength to show their fellow human beings mercy and love, even in the darkest of places.