And they left it wide open for a sequel

I'm always a little embarrassed by my fascination with World War II. It's an extremely common fascination, I know, so it's not like I have some freakish fetish that I should keep hidden. Still, there's a part of me that knows that there's other less dramatic and violent parts of history that contributed almost as much as the second world war, and I feel embarrassed that I keep brushing aside those in favor of yet another WWII movie or book.

Part of my personal fascination is that my grandfather was in the navy, and the war was such a huge part of the lives of all of my grandparents, on my mother's side especially. This is no big deal, though. One of the reasons that so many people have a fascination with the war is because not only was it (to understate it) a huge defining event in our nation's history, but it's something that's still close to us and our generation, something that we've heard firsthand stories of from people we're close to. It's inevitable that we feel more strongly about this war than the revolutionary war or WWI (the original world war).

This is all obvious, of course, but I'm getting to this: recent WWII movies like Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers that show the real horror, fear and emotional drain of war only make me wonder what my friends and I would've done if we'd been pulled from college and dropped into Belgium or Okinawa or if we'd been on the other side of a falling door on Omaha Beach. Would we have been able to pull ourselves together and do what needed to be done? Or would we have been paralyzed with fear? And I imagine those friends being killed in battle right beside me and wonder what having to see that would do to me. It's so far beyond what we knew growing up in the '70's and '80's or what we were ever close to dealing with (in spite of what we might have feared during the Gulf War) that I just can't stop putting us in that situation?

I don't know what I would have done. I'd like to think that I would be able to accept the carnage for the tragedy it was, but still be able to carry on and do what I needed to do. But rationally, that seems so impossible.

I'll tell you this, though: it has absolutely nothing to do with mayonnaise.