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The harrowing World War II movie Twelve O'Clock High begins with a postwar bald and bespectacled Dean Jagger (Colonel Harvey Stovall) riding his bicycle out to an old airfield in Archbury, England, that years earlier had been home to the 918th B-17 Bombing Group of the 8th Air force. As the nondescript Jagger walks along the weed-infested airbase and rusting bombers, the movie unfolds as one long dreamlike flashback of the horrors of what daylight bombing over Germany in 1942 entailed and the courageous men who used to take off from the now eerie, abandoned runways.In juxtaposing the dreadfulness of what the airmen went through (centered around the bravery and eventual breakdown of group Commander Gen. Frank Savage) with the calm of the post-bellum English countryside, director Henry King reminds us how easily we forget horrors of the immediate past. No one in the town, or indeed back home in America, other than the families of the dead, recalled a Bishop, Cobb, Wilson, or the thousands of Savage's anonymous flyers who perished in doing their part to bring down the Third Reich. The tragedy of Stovall's war, King seems to suggest, is that the inferno in the skies was but a blink of the eye from its dividends of victory and rural tranquility ? and that we all are of short memory, allowing even the worst nightmare to retreat into the oblivion of everyday life.
His essay, like all his others, is a gold mine of ideas. He notes that along with the tragic things we've also forgotten that Americans have been bombarded from September 12 on with relentless assaults on morale, that of the troops and those on the home front. Excerpts from the laundry list: Afghanistan is unconquerable, terrain and people will repel all invaders, Americans aren't preparred, high tech weapons will be useless, Muslims will rally to the aid of the Taliban... do these things seem silly in hindsight?
How about these more recent examples:
Already we have forgotten the long ride to Baghdad ? when our ex-generals warned of thousands of dead to come in a deadly siege, and were trumped by relief workers who assured us of millions more refugees. Then there were the cries of defeat when our forces plowed through a windstorm ? as our supposed Dresden-like shock and awe were suddenly mocked not as too terrible but as laughably impotent. We grow depressed now at the canned pessimism of our talking heads who predict failure in post-bellum Iraq ? forgetting that these same prophets swore to us just months ago that thousands would die getting to Baghdad.
And on and on and on... from the "Outrage in the Arab street" when Saddam's son's corpses were displayed for the world to the "outrage in the Arab street" when camera's actually captured a Marine bullet exploding the skull of an insurgent in Fallujah, the hand wringing in the press has been an incessant and shrill Greek chorus that began some time around 2pm eastern on September 11 and has yet to cease.
And it has yet to be proven accurate or reliable on any significant point. None the less, as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow the bed wetting continues without pause.
