War Heroes, Race, and the Battle Lines of American Civil Religion

Our collective relationship to history is part of what’s at stake. In his now classic work Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes “each historical narrative renews a claim to truth” (6). We could say this another way: history (at least as we understand that word in our own culture) is a story about something that’s really happened. History books are shelved as non-fiction. Yet just as a map is not the territory, historical narrative is never the event itself, it is a story we tell about things we consider important. These narratives take many forms—they can be wordless statues, AM radio commentaries, museum exhibits, or commercial entertainment.

Filmmakers sometimes choose to participate in history in their own way, narrating it through artistic media while attempting to preserve any essential elements of truth. Creators committed to historical accuracy hope to tell things as they really were. At the same time depicting some moments of history the way they truly happened might not always be profitable nor help with creators’ larger goals. Although some people raised hell over how USAF handled the anti-DEI directive, it was hardly worse than the much larger omissions that our culture has been complacent about for years. Although we have countless films and semi-fictional television shows about WWII, many of them sideline women and racial minorities. When studios try to engage these subjects people tend not to show up in the same way. When MGM made a movie about the Navajo Codetalkers in 2002, it lost $37 million and got a 33% on Rotten Tomatoes. In contrast, Touchstone’s 2001 movie Pearl Harbor earned a 24% on Rotten Tomatoes while still making a $309 million profit. While there were probably other factors involved in that besides race, we invite readers to name for themselves a successful WWII movie that centers either women or racial minorities.  

“Historical memory” captures a range of concepts. In its broadest sense, it’s the way living people remember historical moments, which can sometimes be quite different from what historical evidence supports. It can preserve positive moments as well as trauma; it is also relevant for thinking about histories that people collectively forget. For both individuals and groups memory can be fragile; it is easy to lose track of details that don’t strike us as significant. In her work on historical memory and Pearl Harbor, historian Emily Rosenberg discusses media as central to US memory, arguing that they enhance or perhaps even implant certain memories, but she also observes that “forgetting is the condition of media death.”

War films are part of historical memory since they both shape how audiences perceive the past and since they are themselves extensions of creators’ own perceptions of history. Films that we regard as “historically accurate” may be an accurate representation of the way society remembers battles and wars, but each one is always still a retrospective interpretation rather than a pure truth. Even “historically accurate” films are shaped by both profit and creative license; these depictions may leave out particular people or details that don’t fit what creators’ have in mind. But there’s more at stake here: many war films—especially those about WWII—are devotional texts for ACR. Like many religions ACR utilizes symbols, myths, community identities, moralities, and so on. Yet one of its most important qualities is that it is experiential. Those invested in ACR feel an emotional connection to the United States. So what happens to that religious connection when war films commit themselves to the historical accuracy of an era when the military was still segregated?

Jon Ebel’s book G.I. Messiahs makes a compelling case for understanding soldiers as a central site of ACR. Soldiers are “the word of the nation made flesh,” and while there may be specific, real soldiers who live the lives we see every day in Instagram clips or TikToks, there also remains the singular “American soldier” who lives as myth. Individual soldiers have real lives, but the symbolic American Soldier signifies a particular set of values. Toby Keith’s “American Soldier” serves as a representative example of this; neither the song nor the music video represent a real flesh-and-blood soldier, but instead depict soldiers from multiple historical wars as they sacrifice for the nation. If soldiers represent the sacred core of the United States (or sacred corps if we want to go with Ebel’s emphasis on embodiment) then stories about them are essentially stories about what makes America American. 

While “historical accuracy” operates as a common goal for many filmmakers, they also deviate from this when the truth might be too different from the myth. As John Lyden points out in Film as Religion, the historical Chris Kyle was anti-Muslim and anti-Iraqi. In his own words Kyle wrote, “I never once fought for the Iraqis. I could give a flying fuck about them.” Yet Clint Eastwood’s gritty retelling of his service in American Sniper shows a different Kyle, a man who weighs Iraqis’ dignity carefully and hesitates to kill unless he must. Eastwood, who is himself a Korean War veteran, had particular ideological aims with the film. He wanted to honor soldiers’ service. Had American Sniper portrayed Kyle’s attitudes toward Muslims and Iraqis in its fullness we would have seen a very different story, one that might have unsettled Eastwood’s goal of honoring Kyle’s character and martyrdom. also taking an anti-war position. Had American Sniper portrayed Kyle’s attitudes toward Muslims and Iraqis in its fullness, we would have seen a very different story, one that might have unsettled Eastwood’s goal of honoring Kyle’s character and martyrdom. 

When it comes to representing US G.I.s in World War II films, soldiers are cast as inherently good and locked in a fight to conquer evil. Of course it is not just films that idealize soldiers as exemplars. Tom Brokaw dubbed WWII soldiers as “the Greatest Generation” and museum exhibits routinely show smiling, strong, (mostly white) men who sacrificed the most of any era out of patriotic love of country. These depictions date back to WWII itself. And in these depictions of “the Good War” we rarely find the actual horrors or detritus of life on the front—we do not access the smells, the fears, we do not encounter despair or emotional breakdowns. The WWII soldier in films is stalwart and unflappable. He knows his duty supersedes his personal needs, and the conventions of masculinity don’t allow for doubt or tears.

But if Ebel is right in describing the soldier as “the word of the nation made flesh”—the personification of meritorious American virtues—then historical accuracy as it is currently practiced may have an insidious quality to it. Our beef here is not with actual flesh-and-blood soldiers. (Both of us, Picca and Monteith, come to this question from different starting points, yet we both land on a posture of respect when it comes to military service.) Instead, the challenge we’re making is that filmmakers’ preoccupation with Normandy and Iwo Jima effectively casts The American Soldier as exclusively white.

HBO’s Band of Brothers is an important devotional text in the ACR canon. Created by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, Band of Brothers follows the men of Easy Company from the 101st Airborne from boot camp to the war’s conclusion. (Spielberg and Hanks’s other combined ACR work—acting, directing, or producing—include Saving Private Ryan, The Pacific, Bridge of Spies, Apollo 13, From Earth to the Moon, Charlie Wilson’s War, Beyond All Boundaries, Parkland, Ithaca, Greyhound, Lincoln, The Post, Semper Fi, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, and, should you want to count them, Spielberg also produced An American Tail: Feivel Goes West and Raiders of the Lost Ark. We’re just saying they’ve taken a genuine interest in ACR.) Band of Brothers is overall a well-made series: it’s well-shot, well-scripted, well-acted, and at times heart-wrenchingly gritty. Hanks and Spielberg intended the program to be generative for Americans’ understanding of military sacrifice. By coincidence, Band of Brothers premiered on September 9, 2001 just two days before 9/11. 

Obviously there were already narratives and images of the WWII veteran in play; Band of Brothers hardly invented the G.I. Messiah. Even so its collision with The War on Terror—an important crisis moment for ACR—made it more potent. Reflecting on this twenty years later, Hanks himself characterized WWII and 9/11 as echoes of the same human propensity for evil: 

“America was again facing a long, unknowable struggle against an enemy that has been, unquestioningly, working for the dark side of humanity. The Nazis and the Japanese empire fought for dark reasons – of race, theology, of a domination of a status quo based on divisions by caste.”

While Hanks’s universalism is poetic, as scholars we may want to draw our own lines with greater specificity. The United States was at war with al-Qaida and the Taliban, but they are no more identical to Nazis than the Nazis were identical to the KGB. However well-intentioned and likeable Hanks may be, his narration was a conflation. Yet Mark Twain once advised us to never let the truth get in the way of a good story.