the hill to the MG nest? This is my biggest dig with the movie and drives me crazy every time I watch it. While one of my favorite movies, Wade is unarmed while the hiding Upham IS. Why in the world would a medic chase the attack right in to the fray if he couldn’t contribute in ANY way? And it was Upham that stayed behind with the rifle.
If anything, and I don’t know the rules regarding this, but if Wade insisted on following Capt Miller in to the fight, if possible, why not give Upham his medic armband and take Uphams’s rifle? I suspect this was against the rules but it’s the only way I could have justified this action in my mind.
The whole point of that “diversion” from their mission was so Spielberg could insert Wade’s death to accent it. But his death made absolutely no sense because he should have been hiding behind a cow with Upham. Since the movie came out, I have scoured the Internet and have yet to find a comment on this. What are your thoughts???
The question I always had was that once they’d identified where the machine gun nest was, why they didn’t send Jackson (Barry Pepper) sneaking up to snipe the machine gunners, and then once he was in a good position, create some kind of diversion- i.e. start firing at the MG position, so they’d return fire, while Jackson opens fire from his hide, taking out at least one, if not all the MG team?
Regarding Wade, my take on it goes back to the beach scene when he’s told to work on someone else he can save and Wade responds that the guy he’s working on is the battalion surgeon. Somebody mentioned that there’s no way a battalion surgeon would be in the first wave which made sense. However, when I read Hal Baumgarten’s book, “D-Day Survivor” he mentioned about a battalion surgeon insisting he be included in the first wave as he strongly felt he would be able to save more lives that way. Like the movie, although the specifics weren’t mentioned, he was killed soon after landing. I think Speiberg was getting across how the actions of some motivated men to do something they wouldn’t normally do. Wade remembered the battalion surgeon risking his life hoping to save more men and Wade decided to advance close behind so he might be able to help somebody wounded sooner. Just my take on it.
Wade is also shown several times to be an impulsive idiot earlier in the movie. He doesn’t seem to get the concept of triage or that by keeping himself alive he’s available to save others. Basically he’s a glory hound.
Well, no - snipers are great force multipliers, but they’re still a support element. The sniper and the maybe the BAR guy (seeing as they had no real machine gun) should have formed a base of fire and pinned the enemy down while the rest of the force took them from their flank.
Either way, what they did was not what I’d have expected from of a squad of hand-picked US Army Rangers in 1944. Those guys were supposed to be the US Army’s elite light infantry.