Looking to Past to See the Present

With every fresh stroke the chance of life grew less and less for those who were not yet killed.

“War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy

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America at war.

The ache ran deep Wednesday when the television screen showed a terrifying display of deadly firepower sending panicked U.S. troops running for cover in a distant land. Your heart sank when some didn’t make it.

The counterattack against terrorism?

Wrong war. Instead it was Episode 7 of “Band of Brothers,” HBO’s extraordinary nonfiction miniseries tracing Easy Company of the 101st Airborne in World War II, from training for invading Normandy through Germany’s surrender.

Ever palpable today is the angst gnawing at Americans caused by mysteriously spreading anthrax as they fight a war against fear.

Yet how strange--with no speck on the globe potentially beyond TV’s panoramic eye--to be excluded from the hotter war going on across the seas. How odd to feel nearer to wars of many years ago than the critical one waged now against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, almost entirely out of media view.

If not the Napoleonic conflict of Tolstoy’s novel, the war in 2001 is still historic and hard to forget. But also one whose violence and pain abroad are easy to ignore, given the knowledge gap separating it from a public distracted at home by the anthrax spores of October.

In contrast, look again at Ken Burns’ great PBS documentary series “The Civil War.” Pop in the episode on 1862’s bloody Battle of Antietam, and swiftly feel the fire of words and old photographs bringing the conflict alive.

Or absorb again the emotional thunderbolts of “The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century.” That fine PBS work memorialized World War I’s slaughter of wave after wave of young men: The body counts in the millions. The shellshocked twitches and disfiguring stumps of survivors. The scarred moonscapes where armies dug their ditch cities. The intricate tunnels at Verdun and terror beneath the ground where poison gas swirled through the earthen, candle-lit, putrid-smelling warrens that entombed French and Germans who fell to the choking fumes.

Even closer to the heart is the war personalized in “Band of Brothers,” which pay channel HBO says is averaging an impressive 6 million-plus viewers an episode, compared with zero Americans at home being granted more than a teasing glimpse of the present combat in Afghanistan.

In early January 1945, Easy’s young paratroopers were in Belgium’s Ardennes Forest, poised to attack the occupied town of Foy, when the Germans shelled their positions, cutting some of them to pieces.

Wednesday’s repeat episode brought it home. Filling the screen at one point was Joe Toye (Kirk Acevedo), on his back but raising himself just enough so he could see the bottom part of his leg, which lay in the snow, a yard away from the upper part. Trying to drag Toye to a foxhole, Bill Guarnere (Frank John Hughes) was blasted, too, his own leg reduced to crimson pulp.

Traumatized by the sight of fallen friends, Lt. Buck Compton (Neal McDonough) dropped his weapon and helmet in a vacant daze, then sat with head buried in hands.

Soon a second withering assault began, and as two Americans shouted encouragement to an exposed comrade crawling frantically toward their foxhole, a German shell blew them apart.

That you felt. The arbitrary nature of death in war, you felt. As you do in coming Episode 8 when a soldier, in the wrong place in the wrong time, is killed by German mortar fire while carrying a sack of potatoes from one building to another.

Wars are not conducted for the entertainment of couch blobs snug in their homes, and President Bush has repeatedly stressed that this one will require great patience from Americans and be fought in part beyond public view. So, fellow citizens, get used to it.

Yet the disconnect remains disturbingly surreal, and the battle against Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorist network as sanitized on TV as the Gulf War in 1991.

Although the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were a horror that won’t soon fade, the question asked in 1991 remains valid today: How can Americans fully appreciate the full, terrible nature of distant war--as when Vietnam gore was beamed into their homes decades earlier--if what TV shows them is largely sterilized?

Of no help is the Taliban, which abhors press freedom and allows in cameras only to publicize U.S. misfires or for some other propaganda advantage. And the Pentagon is tightly censoring information it’s parceling to Americans on an impersonal need-to-know basis.

That includes fancy graphics and computer-driven pictures from the air of bombing raids showing Nintendo-like targets going splat. It includes officers in uniforms briefing the press with visual aids while speaking the arcane tongue of “engagement zones,” followed by retired officers in suits using Telestrators to brief viewers on the briefings.

Whether the coverage we’re getting reflects the war’s air focus, legitimate concerns for security or Pentagon paranoia--or all three--does not alter the reality that warfare is being defined for Americans via second-and third-hand experiences.

Primary sources beyond accounts spoon-fed by the government? They’re rare when media are relegated mostly to the war’s fringes.

After a U.S. bomb inadvertently hit that Red Cross warehouse in the Afghan capital, Kabul, for example, CNN went to its correspondent Walter Rogers in northern Afghanistan, who naturally had seen nothing. He turned to a Red Cross spokesman, who also had seen nothing, but could relate what he had “heard” of a bomb hitting the structure.

Meanwhile, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour got her “exclusive” interview with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld this week, but in Islamabad, Pakistan, was relying on “sources” for word of heavy bombardments of Afghanistan cities that yielded “potential heavy casualties” in Kandahar.

Just as the Fox News Channel on Thursday illustrated “reports coming out of new attacks” by drawing circles around cities on a map.

As for close-up combat coverage, there was this. “The battle draws on for hours,” reported NBC’s Jim Cummins, with the 101st Airborne. Yes, the same 101st Airborne whose World War II duty is depicted in “Band of Brothers.” Except this week’s combat on NBC, captured in hazy green nightscope, instead of being real was a “live action exercise” in Ft. Polk, La.

If these men do see action in Afghanistan, will you and I get even a peek at them? Will a Joe Toye or Bill Guarnere be among them? A Buck Compton? A thoughtful Harvard man like David Webster (Eion Bailey), who more than any other soldier in “Band of Brothers” sees the horrors of battle through the observant eyes of Tolstoy’s Pierre Bezuhov in “War and Peace”?

In a poignant voice-over, Webster wonders if Americans back home will “ever know what it cost the soldiers to win this war.”

Whatever that cost in this year’s fight against terrorism, it appears we’ll be learning of it from “sources.”

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.