Beginning of Essay
War cannot be faced. It is too dreadful. It is the great emptiness that stands before life, transforms itself into a million shapes of unutterable horror, then returns to mocking silence. It is the nightmare from which we can never awake, because the nightmare is ....

Middle of Essay
.... to our disillusionment with it, and the work of journalists like Michael Herr and filmmakers like Oliver Stone and Francis Ford Coppola, Vietnam flickers in and out of our imaginations as a minor piece of hell, a torn-out fragment from a Bosch painting. But World War II, the Good War, the Heroic War, the war that saved the world, is different. Yes, we know it was dreadful, but we don't really want to know: We'd rather cling to the image of jutting-jawed John Wayne firing his machine gun at a collapsing line of Axis dummies. After "," the myth of World War II will never be the same. Using the overpowering techniques of modern film, Steven Spielb ....