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Book Review:
Dean Hughes' Soldier Boys
by
Stephen Wunderli
A year ago,
I was filming a commercial for the National Hospice Foundation.
They wanted to appeal to the children of elderly parents on behalf
of their parents, to remind them of the sacrifices the "greatest
generation" made-and to offer an alternative to dying in a hospital.
These men and
women who had done so much for our country deserved better, they
deserved to be at home for their last days, to die with dignity.
We told the story of a man who had been a teenager at the Battle
of the Bulge, survived and lived into his late seventies. So naturally,
part of our cinematic storytelling was to re-create the battlefield
of the Ardennes. There wasn't much acting involved, so we hired
my 17 year-old son and a few of his pals. It was an exciting scene
to film. Everything was authentic, right down to the boots they
were wearing and the guns they carried. All their mothers came to
watch, most of them in their early 40s who had as I had, grandparents
or parents who had seen the battlefield first-hand.
For my generation,
there is that distance between World War II and the life we lead.
Most of us have never been to war. The closest we came was watching
the war in Vietnam on the nightly news when we were kids, or listening
to stories by grandparents or seeing their journals. None of us
on the shoot that day had ever lost an immediate family member in
a war. We had led a charmed life, mostly. Watching our children
grow up without that risk hanging over them. So none of us really
expected, or were prepared for what happened that day. It was late
in the afternoon. We wanted the golden light of sunset. The boys
arrived in their cargo shorts and running shoes, and headed for
the wardrobe trailer. The parents waited in the parking lot. We
chatted the small talk of suburbia: Football games and soccer and
restaurants and this or that teacher at the school.
But when the
boys stepped out of the trailer, head-to-toe as soldiers, the talking
stopped.
The boys themselves
were quiet. A strange silence fell over the entire group. Eyes teared
up immediately, and not just the mothers, but all of us. Here were
our boys, our high school seniors. We suddenly saw them as parents
saw their own boys 50 years ago---many of them, for the last time.
Nearly 300,000 Americans lost their lives in World War II. The reality
of losing a son, a child really, was more than we could bear.
As our children
now begin to ask questions about Afghanistan and try to understand
the concepts of freedom and democracy, the best learning ground
is American history. Dean Hughes has written an excellent book for
young readers that personalizes the ideologies at conflict in WWII.
Soldier Boys is two stories: a German boy growing up in Hitler Youth,
and a farm boy from Utah. They enter the war with their own disillusions,
their own innocence. But it in the final scene, neither is part
of the great war machine they envisioned. Instead, they are alone,
in the darkness of the forest, with nothing to cling to but their
own beliefs.
This is powerful
story; well-crafted. It doesn't try to do too much, but rather let's
us see the children who went to war, and the kind of men left standing
when it was over. In the pile of books about this part of our country's
history, this is a must-read for middle-grades and maybe even older.
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