'The Best Years Of Our Lives'

One of the most sobering moments of the recent history is watching Ken Burns' "The War" and listening to veterans from World War II talking honestly and openly about the horrors of their experience in Europe and Asia and the frightening period after they got back.

It's not a story heavily publicized from the Great Generation after a justified war in which actual evil and genocide were defeated. What we learned was that war is a giant shit sandwich no matter if it's a faceless Vietcong or Al Qaeda, or jackbooted Nazis dumping remains of Jewish corpses to the incinerator. It doesn't matter. It all fucks you up.

"The Best Years of Our Lives" -- with a light, but poignant brush -- chronicles the change from combat to going back home where you just wish everything was the same (even though it isn't) and family and friends can not really handle that every thing has changed.

It's jingoistic to a fault. Although it doesn't throw darts at the idea of killing Nazis, but it takes a fair share of shots at the idea of war and how pointless it can be.

But as we'd probably like to paint a pretty picture of that time in this country, it's a stark portrait that a lot of lives were lost through a soul-breaking Depression and a country so unwilling to stick their nose into someone else's problems that it almost destroyed the world.