Word: war
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...even worse for our troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan," Hanks says. "At least the Pacific-war soldiers coming back from World War II decompressed on ships for weeks. And then once the troops arrived portside, it was often a long train ride home to Peoria. Today these guys in Afghanistan fight in bloody hell and are flown back in 18 hours. How can they cope with that? How can they suddenly go from Tora Bora to Peyton Place?" Even the legendary Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier in World War II, suffered posttraumatic stress disorder after his return from...
...past decade, Hanks has worked overtime to support the National World War II Museum in New Orleans - a pet project of the late historian Stephen Ambrose, on whose book Band of Brothers was based. On March 2, the museum, which will soon open a Pacific-theater wing, hosted a reception after a local screening of The Pacific, attended by the last wave of old-timers who consider V-J day a personal accomplishment. Wherever Hanks travels, veterans accost him with thank-yous. "It's pretty heady," Hanks says. "But now the Korean War guys have started coming...
...eventually taught himself. As a teenager, Hanks was a straight arrow wanting to earn a decent paycheck. He believed in the American Dream, and the Vietnam War made him uneasy. The closest Hanks got to protesting Vietnam, however, was privately rooting for the Smothers Brothers, whose show was eventually canceled by CBS because of their antiwar banter. Immune to Berkeley radicalism and too "unhip" - his word - for Richard Pryor or Lenny Bruce, Hanks' comedic sensibility tilted more toward Bob Hope. Hanks was so square that he remembers rebuking a peer in his high school government class for saying in April...
...horrors of Nixon's Vietnam War strategy hit Hanks while he was working as a bellman for the Oakland Hilton in the mid-'70s. He was often tasked with shuttling guests to and from the nearby airport. Back then he saw the charter planes that periodically arrived filled with frightened Vietnamese orphans escaping totalitarianism. Once Hanks' movie career took off with Big (1988), he desperately wanted to make a first-class Vietnam War film. But by then, a second wave of Vietnam movies was in full swing (Full Metal Jacket and Good Morning, Vietnam came...
...high school teacher ever did, but the entertainment level had to be hyperkinetic to hold his attention. It was the same with most academic histories. "The writing is often too dull to grab regular people by the lapel," he says. Ken Burns' miniseries The Civil War, which aired on PBS in the fall of 1990, gave him a sense of how he might bridge that gap. "I watched that with my son," Hanks recalls. "There was nothing but great music married with talking heads, pan and scan of old photographs and get to the creeks at sunset. But I wept...