I picked up a used rental DVD of this movie yesterday. I went to preview it last night and found it so riveting that I stayed up way later than planned and watched the whole movie in one sitting.

A bit of synchronicity came into play for me on this one. Earlier in the day, I had coincidentally popped in a DVD of Mail Call and watched the episode on Iwo Jima where one of the survivors (a medic like in Flags of Our Fathers) talked of having dreams of men dying every night for fifty years after the war. This struck home because my own father (a WWII medic) had the same problem.

Flags of Our Fathers does a good job of weaving together battle scenes, the problems a veteran has with recurring nightmares, the guilt several veterans have with being labeled heroes and put on a war bond tour while all the members of their former platoon get killed in the war all the while, the story is being retold to the son of one of the survivors. These plots are woven together in such a way that it successfully gives a very surreal feel to the movie which brings the importance of the dreams in focus.

The movie does a good job not only of portraying the gruesome reality of war, but also the deep psychological scarring left with the survivors. It also does a good job of pointing out the difficulties of labeling only certain individuals as heroes, when battlefields are littered with dead who undobtedly dyed in a heroic fashion. Likewise, other survivors may have committed their heroic acts more anonymously.

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VERY well said. I enjoyed the movie a lot, being a veteran myself. I would have to agree that the word hero is thrown around too much. Jessica Lynch was, and still is called a hero and she never once fired a shot at the enemy. Its a shame what happened to her and she never asked to be called a hero but the media can be pretty stupid. Who is a hero to me? My buddy who stood next to me with bullets coming down range and didnt run away. All my buddies who wouldnt let each other be killed. And all the ones who died for thier buddy standing next to them.

  

> Who is a hero to me? My buddy
>who stood next to me with bullets coming down range and didnt
>run away. All my buddies who wouldnt let each other be killed.
>And all the ones who died for thier buddy standing next to
>them.
The movie makes that point very clear. The narrator talks of his misgivings at being marched out before the crowdas a hero, where in combat, they felt the only reason they were there was to help each other.

I guess "Letters From Iwo Jima" will be released on DVD May 22nd and I'll buy a used rental DVD of that in July or August. I expect he'll pay the Japanese the same sort of respect he dealt out in Flags of Our Fathers. But in the case of the Japanese soldiers, I would expect the movie to have a sense of abandonment since resupply was not an option for them. Sad stuff.

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