The 'good wars,' too, have 'last letters
home'
In a letter published in The Sun Herald on Feb. 12, "When is the
price of freedom too high?" Charles Roithmayr bared heartfelt terror
and fear as he agonizes over Emmy winner Bill Couturie's HBO
documentary "Last Letters Home."
He laments of the documentary, "the last words soldiers wrote are
read with choked emotion," "In the documentary, we hear young
warriors confronting their fears, contemplating death, thinking of
home and family," and "Do Americans expect service families to
continue sacrificing their loved ones to a war machine that
constantly needs feeding?"
Mr. Roithmayr needs to understand that during World War II,
documentaries in the vein of Bill Couturie's HBO documentary "Last
Letters Home" were voluntarily "domestically censored" as one of the
shared sacrifices of war for discerning American journalists
(Re: Michael S. Sweeney's "Secrets of Victory," a review at:
http:// uncpress.unc.edu/chapters/ sweeney secrets.html).
These journalists understood that such documentaries (and
defeatist responses to such) aided and abetted the enemy, emboldened
the enemy to fight one more day, placed an American soldier in enemy
crosshairs one more day - and caused one more letter home to become
a "last letter home."
As John Stuart Mill stated in 1865, "War is an ugly thing, but
not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral
and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is
much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to
fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety,
is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made
and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
ARMOND 'SI' SIMMONS
Pell City, Ala.
