Band of Brothers

I don’t know exactly what I was doing when “Band of Brothers” first aired in 2001. Raising children, I guess. But I’ve been watching it now, courtesy of Netflix, for several weeks, and the day after I view each episode I can’t get the music or the images out of my mind. The score is elegaic but forward-moving, perfectly suited to its subject, and it breaks my heart, as does the show.

I have seen war movies, plenty of them. But there’s an unrelenting power to these episodes that brings home over and over again what we owe to these men. What they did for us and for our country. The scenes are gray, colorless: the cold, the mud, the fear, the constant presence of death. And the soldiers, they are so very, very young.

I watched the final episode last night, and it was a comfort to learn the outcome of those E Company survivors, to know that they returned home to be mail carriers and earth movers. To live ordinary lives.