Male Bonding

The 10-part HBO series Band of Brothers, based on Stephen Ambrose’s best-selling book, is about some important things: heroism and determination; training and common sense; luck and misfortune; good and evil.

But it’s also about something more simple and mundane: male bonding.

Not to trivialize the exploits of the US 506th Regiment 101st Airborne – better known as Easy Company – but this is really one big-budget, extended buddy movie, just as Ambrose’s book about E Company tells a story of male friendships forged in battle forever.

One look at the promo for the HBO series confirms this is male bonding territory: "3 Years in the Making… 8 Acclaimed Directors… 500 Cast Members… 700 Authentic WWII Weapons… 10,000 Extras… 14,000 Rounds of Ammo Used Per Day… 2 Million Feet of Film!" What is all this but the typical guy fascination with stats, numbers, figures – the stock knowledge of the war buff?

Meanwhile, Band of Brothers is promoted as "Executive Produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg" – two Hollywood buddies who worked together (and presumably bonded) during the making of Saving Private Ryan.

Let’s face it: only guys would bond for life over the shared task of killing other people. War, despite all the advances made by women in the armed services, is still a Guy Thing. You want to start a family, lay down some roots, build a nice, cozy home, do some nesting? Find a woman. You want to get a war going? Send some guys.

The men who made up Easy Company couldn’t have been more diverse in their backgrounds – some studied at Harvard and Yale, while others excelled in shooting squirrels out of trees in Virginia – but they did share some common qualities. They all signed up for the Airborne Division, a tough group of soldiers trained to parachute behind enemy lines and pave the way for Allied advances (the extra $50 service pay a month was an added incentive). During six months of training under Capt. Herbert Sobel in a Georgia boot camp, they prepared harder than any other division. They hated Sobel – a hardass disciplinarian who excelled in "chickenshit" regulations – but it was probably his rigorous training that helped them survive a series of battles leading from Normandy on D-Day to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest mountain retreat in Bavaria.

Again and again, the point Ambrose’s book and the HBO series make is that these guys may have hated the army and its bureaucracy, may have lacked much idealism beyond finishing their service in one piece; but once they hit the battlefield and the foxholes, an overriding duty took over: to cover each other’s backs. They would literally die for one another, because so much depended on the other guy dying for them.

In times of crisis, people tend to bond very quickly. The men who made up E Company bonded for life, from the first nighttime drop into Normandy on June 6, 1944 (amidst heavy enemy anti-aircraft fire), up to the time they disbanded in November 1945.

Both the book and the HBO series focus on Lt. Richard Winters (played by Damian Lewis), the 27-year-old officer who took over Easy Company once it hit the ground in Normandy, leading them across France, Holland, Belgium, and finally into Germany. Winters is the moral compass of the story: he barely drinks, cusses, or raises his voice, yet all of his men would follow him anywhere. Ambrose paints Winters in glorified colors, yet detects a testiness towards Sobel and other officers who lack the ability to lead. Ambrose – who has written biographies of Eisenhower, Thomas Jefferson, and just about every aspect of the European Front during World War II – had direct access to the survivors of E Company (many of whom make short interview appearances in the HBO series, kind of book-ending each episode the way Spielberg did in Saving Private Ryan). Their clear prose and human insights in the book are what make the chronicle of E Company a classic.

There are surprises: Ambrose tells of a private named Fritz Niland, an American who lost three brothers within one week following D-Day – one in Normandy, one at Utah Beach, and one on the China-Burma front. The army, in a move that may have inspired the premise of Saving Private Ryan, sent the sole surviving son home as soon as possible.

Ambrose is also clear about how combat changes men. Far from being heroes 24/7, after the E Company soldiers experienced their "baptism of fire" in Normandy, they never again risked their lives so eagerly again. "The men had taken chances they would not take again," Ambrose notes. Survival automatically became a more important priority than heroism. Yet heroes they all were.

Another interesting aspect of the book is how the men of E Company – even after being injured – would keep requesting to be sent back to their pals on the front lines. Normally, the US Army rotated recovering soldiers to new squadrons. But Easy Company’s men would sneak out of the hospital, go AWOL, just to hitch a ride back to their comrades in arms. You have to believe that the experience of warfare made them friends for life.

Or then again: Is war really some fantastic Disneyland for the male psyche?

I kept getting that impression while reading Band of Brothers, especially the chapters entitled "The Best Feeling in the World" and "Drinking Hitler’s Champagne." Ambrose doesn’t disguise the fact that men enjoy blowing things up and knocking things down, on some level. Destruction on a spectacular level is what combat provided. (This is what historian Glenn Gray calls one of the "secret attractions of war.") The HBO series, now halfway through, features at least one spectacular battle sequence per episode. I won’t pretend that this action isn’t one of the main reasons males enjoy watching the series (and war movies in general). One finicky viewer griped to me that "the first and second episode was like a full erection… the third one – only a half." War is hell, but an exciting hell, to many.

By the end of Band of Brothers, when E Company has survived the Battle of the Bulge and has been sent to Berchtesgaden, Bavaria to "liberate" (i.e., secure and loot) Hitler and Goering’s vast mountain hoard of Rembrandts, van Goghs, Renoirs, fine jewelry and finer wines, you get the sense that Ambrose is almost salivating. Sure, to the victors go the spoils and all that. But the way Ambrose glamorizes this frantic plundering of art treasures and bulletproof Mercedeses, it’s almost like Nazi Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

Then again, this was the big payoff for E Company, a group of outstanding soldiers who had endured a killing winter in Ardennes, and were ready to paratroop into the Pacific next, if needed. It’s a guy thing, perhaps, to wonder what it’s like to sit in the middle of The Crossroads in Belgium, freezing your nuts off in bitter December, waiting for Patton’s tank army to break through the line with fresh supplies. And to comment on the Germans, in your best, grimmest US soldier’s black humor: "They’ve got us surrounded – the poor bastards."

Yep, it’s a guy thing.

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