by Kevin Bresnahan, Contributor

An anthropologist will tell you that the maximum number of people you can know in a meaningful way, really know, the perfect size for a human community in other words – Facebook Friends notwithstanding – is about 150-200 people. We gather in groups this size all the time, in schools, in business, in clubs and bowling leagues. Basically, we create villages.

This also happens to be roughly the size of an infantry line company in the 2nd World War. It takes a village to wage war, too, so it would seem. Sixteen million Americans served in the military during WWII. One in ten saw combat. The entire country was mobilized, but much like today’s endless wars, a tiny fraction actually paid the price. 

The difference between the war as experienced by the men in the line and the way the people at home remembered it is like night and day. As Walt Whitman said of the first modern American war, “The real war will never get in the books.”

Taking up this theme, the late Penn culture critic Paul Fussell, a man of prodigious erudition who happens to have also served with the infantry in Europe in the 2nd World War, spent a career studying – and sardonically mocking – the ways in which Americans movies and popular culture worked to sanitize the war, to make it palatable for people at home. The reality of it would have been too much, per Fussell, the hell we asked these young people to go through, the waste and the stupidity and the sadism of it all. Movies tended to focus on the heroic, instead, or to pass over the brutality with a kind of stylized fatalistic sigh. 

Then one day in 1998 the war movie changed. 

This is not to say that Stephen Spielberg, in Saving Private Ryan, showed what combat is really like. What Fussell and his generation had taught us, what the Vietnam writers had reinforced, was that combat, like falling in love, is something you can only know by experience. 

But Spielberg did devise a new way of seeing war, taking the familiar tropes of the WWII movie and defamiliarizing them in such a way that we can see again. The bullets do not echo and twang like in a cowboy movie, they hiss and snap like full metal murder wasps. The oversaturated footage, the hollow otherworldly sound design, it’s all not unlike an acid trip.  All of this serves to make the war strange to us so that we can see it fresh.

Twenty years ago this month, coming off that accomplishment, Spielberg, along with Saving Private Ryan star Tom Hanks, returned to the 2nd World War again, for HBO, to make what may be the best TV show ever made. 

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The central figure of Band of Brothers (HBO, 2001) is Berks County native Richard Winters, the father to these brothers. Damien Lewis, the posh English actor out of Eton and the Royal Shakespeare Company and probably the Order of the Bath for all I know, somehow inhabits a quintessential American thoroughly. His take on Winters’s steady integrity and love for his men serves as the bedrock on which the whole show is built.

The performance is superb. I have identified exactly one bad line read by Lewis in ten episodes. 

But the real stars of the show are the troopers, the boys, the happy few. Each episode opens with interview footage of the former soldiers themselves, now well into deep old age. These gentle men are from various regions, backgrounds, classes and levels of education, and they have only one thing in common: they have seen the worst that existence has to offer, they have gazed on hell, and they have met the challenge. They have been weighed, they have been measured, and they have each of them added up. It gives them, even the humblest among them, an enormous gravity and dignity. 

The actors who portray this group of men are a winning bunch. Despite the brilliantly rendered scenes of combat, high production values, gorgeous cinematography, in Band of Brothers it is the human stories that are foregrounded over military ones. The show lives or dies on the likeability of these young men. Actually, the lovability. For a show about the most brutal event in the history of the world, these guys are pretty sweet. Or most of them are, anyway. Maybe not as nice as the prisoners at Shawshank Prison, but right up there. 

Television loves families like this, like E Company, called in the military parlance of the day, “Easy” company. The company is the basic unit of an army, the name deriving from the Latin of the Roman legions. Those in your company, your companions, were the ones with whom you ate, or took bread, pan, together.

Scott Grimes’s Donald Malarkey appears in every episode, just as the real Sergeant Malarkey appeared in every battle, never wounded, never missing a day on the line. The course of the war can be traced in Malarkey’s descent from friendly, easy-going Irishman who loves a good craps game, to the war-withered, red-eyed husk of a man barely holding his decimated platoon together by the spring of 1945 in “The Last Patrol.” Grimes’s performance is probably the best thing in this TV show. 

By way of local interest, Bill Guarnere (Frank John Hughes) and Babe Heffron (Robin Laing) are from South Philadelphia, though Hughes’s Philly accent is half Boston, half Brooklyn, zero Front Street. 

Popeye Wynn, Albert Blithe, Compton, the Bull, Sgt Lipton, Martin, Lt Welsh, Doc Roe, poor sweet doomed Skip Muck… Over ten episodes we live with these characters, and the corps of likable American and British talent who bring them to life. We come to know their mannerisms, their walks, their ticks. Perconte with his ever-present toothbrush, Luz the joker and mimic, Liebgott the tough Jew for whom it was personal. 

These are the boys of the 40s, wisecrackers, and some of them highly accomplished wisecrackers, in an age in which the wisecrack was a political statement. They grew up in a depression, without any prospects at all, and just when things started looking up, they were sent into the howling heart of the most vicious war in the history of mankind. Their response was to hone a level of sardonic irony that would make a Brooklyn hipster swoon. When the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment dropped into Normandy in the wee hours of June 6, 1944, they carried their M1 rifles and those stupid Brit musette bags, but they also carried Bogart with them, they carried Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night. They carried Bugs Bunny. 

Frankly, even if the Soviets hadn’t already beaten the tar out of them by this point, the Germans never stood a chance. 

And over them all, always watching, always looking out for the boys, Captains Winters and Nixon (Ron Livingston) the two good officers and one of the great bromances in American television. 

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The series has a classical shape, beginning with training in the Deep South under the sadistic officer Sobel (David Schwimmer somehow contriving to find a character more annoying than Ross from Friends.) and crossing the ocean for training in England and, in the summer of 1944, on to Europe, and the Great Crusade. Fall comes on, and with it the gray rain of Holland. Then winter, when Easy Company will be tested to the end of its limits. 

When 2nd World War began there was not much that the British, French, Germans, Russians and Japanese all agreed on, except one thing: the United States Army sucked. Americans were luxury lovers, spoiled and materialistic, sex-obsessed and loud. And it must be said that when the Americans first ran up against the German Afrika Korps at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia in 1942, those green young men took one look at the Panzer IV tanks and the battle-hardened grenadiers marching beside them singing lusty Teutonic songs of war as they advanced, and the Yanks bugged out and headed for the hills. Personally, I feel like I would have done the same. 

Nonetheless by the time the 101st Airborne was sent to the Ardennes Forest in the winter of 1944, they were a very different army indeed, but there were still lingering doubts, not least from our allies the British, about the toughness of the American soldier. 

Christmas, 1944 changed all that. 

Two episodes cover the Battle of the Bulge, the dreamy, snowy “Bastogne” and the aptly titled “Breaking Point,” the best episode in the series. 

The peak comes fifty-nine minutes into the latter. Lieutenant Dike, a careerist who only joins Easy Company to get enough combat time to allow his quick promotion up the ladder, leads the men in an assault on a German position. The battle is really well done; the GIs sprinting across the snow, the German gunners firing back, a series of quick, kinetic cuts. But Lt Dike’s will fails, and he crumples into fear and paralysis. The men are trapped in the open, sitting ducks. In the series’ most thrilling, heroic moment, another officer steps in, charging into the teeth of German fire and reasserting authority and courage. Lieutenant Speirs (Matthew Settle) is a complicated guy, the man known for shooting unarmed prisoners – and maybe also a drunken American sergeant – and for thieving anything not nailed down in occupied Germany. Speirs is nonetheless the man for the job. What is needed in war, Band of Brothers reminds us, is not the same as what is needed in civilian life. 

This is a big part of what Hanks and Spielberg are trying to tell us. There are sentimental moments, of course, but by and large the show keeps reminding us that to win that war each had to give up some part of their humanity, as each of the characters will do in the end. As Speirs explains to a frightened private early on, “Here's the way I see it. There's only one way for me to fight this war, and that's to accept the fact... that I'm already dead.”

Band of Brothers is honest about some things which Americans do not want to hear about the “Good War.” Some men are cowardly. Some officers are not up to the job, like the ticket-punching Yale man Lieutenant Dike. And sometimes we killed prisoners, too. 

The real war will never get in the books. 

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In the end the company will go out on their last patrol, and storm the spiritual home of the Nazi party, but before that, the men stumble across the Kaufering IV concentration camp in the German woods. In the stark skeletal faces of the inmates they see the full depravity of the Final Solution. The episode, in an echo of the old Frank Capra wartime propaganda films, is called “Why We Fight.”

But in the end, spring comes and the war passes. In a heartwarming coda, Winters watches the men play baseball in a warm peaceful field, and reflects what will happen to them after the war. Many are successful in later life, and many are damaged. Many are both. 

Over the years the men of E Company will stay in touch, maintain the powerful bonds which had been formed in the sweat and humidity of Currahee, and the mud and snow and blood of Europe. Much is made, in the interview portions, of the amazing closeness which the men of Easy would show for each other over the years. For decades after the war, despite the passage of time and the inevitable trials of life, the anger, the depression, the PTSD, still this group of men still gets together every year. One man tries to explain why, by quoting the Saint Crispin’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers

For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother

But we get this already. Having spent ten episodes with these men, having watched them sacrifice everything for each other and for us, we don’t want to lose them either.