Word: soldiers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Forrest is hardly the first idiot hero to ride through a fiction, bodies dropping all around him. The Czechs celebrate the apparently obtuse Good Soldier Schweik, whereas in terms of plot Voltaire's Candide might have been a Gump pilot. Yet Schweik is not so much a defense of dumb optimism as an argument against militarism and a celebration of sly peasant smarts. And Candide may be literature's most ferocious send-up of cheeriness in the face of the world's cruelties. By its end, its battered hero has abandoned his opening premise that everything happens for the best...
...looked like an episode of roadside vengeance. About 30 miles southwest of the capital city of Kigali, four Tutsi, one of them a soldier of the victorious Rwandan Patriotic Front, stood around a Hutu man in his 50s. He was barefoot and dressed in a torn shirt and baggy pants. A dirty strip of blue- and-white fabric roped his elbows tight behind his back. His three young accusers shouted that the Hutu was a member of a militia group that had slaughtered Tutsi and political moderates earlier this year. They had seen him beat an old woman to death...
...R.P.F. checkpoint just up the road, the soldier handed the Hutu prisoner over to one of his uniformed comrades, who shoved him behind a stand of trees. Was the man mistreated? Was he killed? That question writ large is preoccupying the whole of Rwanda. Are the Tutsi who now rule the country killing many, some, or any of the Hutu who have returned to their homes...
...only are there enough of them -- 30,000 in Goma, 8,000 more south of Lake Kivu, and 2,000 in the French safe zone in southwest Rwanda -- but they are surprisingly well organized. Units have stayed together, and the command structure is intact. Wounded soldiers are visited every day by their colonel, twice a week by the army's Chief of Staff. While other refugees starve, the Rwandan military receive not just rations but something even more important: money, in the form of Rwandan francs brought by the fleeing former government from Kigali. "Every soldier continues to receive...
...mother (Sally Field), the boy discovers two things: he can run like a gale-force wind, and he will always love his neighbor Jenny (Robin Wright). He goes to war with one friend, a young black man (Mykelti Williamson) dreaming of shrimp boats, and comes home with another, career soldier Dan Taylor (Gary Sinise). And wherever he is, he bumps into famous people: George Wallace and Richard Nixon, J.F.K. and L.B.J., Elvis and John Lennon (all integrated onscreen with Hanks through ingenious special effects). Almost everyone Forrest knows dies. He survives, through his goodness and the miracle of idiot grace...