I love being a woman. I love that my design was motherhood. Even though I have not been blessed with children, I love nurturing and nourishing small living things (plants, chickens, sometimes other people’s children). I love learning to be soft, steady, and to go at a feminine pace instead of a masculine one. I love creating beauty and tending. I love building relationships and being part of a community. As a tomboy, I even love not being a man. I love men and masculinity, but I don’t want to be a man. I’m quite in awe of being a woman, thank you very much.

‍So why do I find my nervous system calming down when the opening credits of The Pacific starts playing? (For those of you who don’t know, that is HBO’s show about the actions of 1st Marine Division in the Pacific, covering things like the battles for Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. They focus on Robert Leckie, Eugene Sledge, and John Basilone.[1]) I had started to get the itch to return to my favorite military shows, and since the second the Band of Brothers’ soundtrack starts playing, I fall asleep (so annoying), I decided to try The Pacific and see if I could stay awake. The opening credits began.[2]

‍I instantly felt calmer than I had in days.

I texted this to my brother who was a tanker in the Army: Someday, I’m going to have to psychoanalyze myself to figure out why when the intro to the Pacific starts playing and I see Leckie and Basilone, my anxiety ratchets way, way down and I can breathe. (It’s not just the Pacific. It started with Band of Brothers and is true about most of my favorite war movies/shows. I’m just currently watching the Pacific.)‍ ‍

I’ve attempted this self-psychoanalysis many times (War Movies, Part 1 and Part 2.) because I don’t really understand this part of myself, and I understand it less the older I get and the more entrenched in my own femininity I become. I get why they haunt me. I get the pity, compassion, and sadness that they produce. I get the honor and respect and concern for our service men and women and their families that they grow. I get all that because that seems obvious. That’s their job. I will continue to say until my dying day that the really important and solid war movies and shows are for civilians, not for the military. They are so that we understand and appreciate on some microscopic level the sacrifices our military has made. I think it is important for citizens to watch war movies and shows, the good ones, because they help us not take our warriors for granted and not rush into war blindly.[3]‍ ‍

All that makes sense.‍ ‍

I also acknowledge that there is a great beauty to the moments of love and tenderness between men in these extreme situations. I also get that part of my love of these violent stories. The very violence of them, the cruelty, the brutality, the horror and darkness, make the moments of love all the more profound. I am not looking at war with my heroic-colored-glasses on. I know the baseness that it brings out in humanity. I know the destruction it brings to the human soul and the human body. I, in no way, want and admire war. What I admire is warriors and these moments where men lay down their lives for their brothers. Where they’re dirty, enduring, standing, and there for one another. Where they dare great things for each other. These moments must be honored because they are beautiful. ‍ ‍

“War brings out the worst and the best in people. Wars do not make men great, but they do bring out the greatness in good men. War is romantic only to those who are far away from the sounds and turmoil of battle. For those of us who served in Easy Company, and for those who served their country in other theaters, we came back as better men and women as a result of being in combat, and most would do it again if called upon. But each of us hoped that if we had learned anything from the experience it is that war is unreal, and we earnestly hoped that it would never happen again.” (emphasis mine)‍ ‍
Dick Winters‍ ‍

Again, all that makes sense. It’s something I’ve loved about war stories and brotherhood stories since I was a kid. ‍ ‍

Why do I find them restful? That’s what I don’t get.‍ ‍

Trying to really face myself and be honest, which is harder than you think it is, I texted my brother this: Here’s my gut instinct. It makes me feel like my spiritual reality is visible. It pushes away all the bureaucracy of the modern world, all the everyday trials, and says this is your reality and you’re not alone, and the war is already won.‍ ‍

This is the part of my love for military memoirs that is hard to talk about because it is so very and deeply personal. War stories are for me an expression of my Christianity. The New Testament often uses military metaphors to describe our Chrisian walk. It’s hard to suck the marrow from those passages if you don’t have any idea what war is like and what being in the military is like. If you don’t understand the violence and the brotherhood, you’re missing out on some rich truth and some strong encouragement to maintain your church membership. If you haven’t watched the violence of hand-to-hand combat, do you know what it means to “Be killing sin, or sin will be killing you.”?[4]‍ ‍

My life took a turn in early 2026 that added a whole different layer of stress and work to my home. My husband had to have emergency open heart surgery. This not only means that I’m on high alert all the time for every twinge in his body, but that I’m also carrying far bigger mental, emotional, and physical load right now as we attempt to keep his stress levels down. I’m having to manage phone calls, appointments, information gathering, medical bills and more, on top of managing my home, a part-time job, and my homemaker group. I’m trying to shield him as much as I can from stress, including my own. Now, the good side of all this is that I have found you can only be stressed so much and then it sort of stops mattering. I just have no more stress to give. I have also found that my prayer life has blossomed because I am going to my heavenly Father more and more and more. And I’m learning that I can handle far more than I thought I could. All good things. It has also been a solid reminder that this world, no matter how calm my home, fun my chickens, and beautiful my flowers, isn’t home. It’s not my HOME home, not my final resting place. It has re-reminded me that heaven is not here on earth, and I shouldn’t expect it to be. Everything is “pre-ash” as my dad is fond of saying.‍ ‍

Watching The Pacific that night refocused my attention on the big picture. It brought clarity and a narrowed focus. It acknowledged all the phone calls and emails and frustrations and mounting bills and said that’s not the real reality. The real reality is that you are in a war, you are in the great war, the greatest of wars, but you are safe, and Christ has already won. Death, dismemberment, and despair can’t take that away from you. If they can’t take that away from me then phone calls certainly can’t either.‍ ‍

One of the great struggles of all believers, and I think maybe especially modern believers, is sight vs. faith. We live in a materialistic culture that is entirely sight-based, though that is changing. We aren’t facing any major persecution in our day-in-day-out lives[5]. And we have it pretty cushy compared to everyone else in history. I think living by sight is also part of our creaturehood. We are created beings, and I think that means we are affected most strongly by things that impact our senses. The problem is that we’re also fallen, so all our finiteness is tainted and twisted by sin. Instead of using the gift of sight, we put our trust in the gift of sight. The Christian life is one of constant preaching to oneself that what we see isn’t all there is or even the true reality. ‍ ‍

Going through a season of extra burdens, extra challenges, and extra layers of mind-numbing bureaucracy[6] with lists and lists and lists of things I’m supposed to be doing to care for myself properly and care for him properly and keep everyone else happy starts to feel like death by a thousand cuts. I feel like I’m being forced to live by sight instead of faith because the sight side of life is so heavy, unknown, confusing, ridiculous, and unending I can’t see anything else. I didn’t know how to put it into words beyond drowning in minutia. ‍ ‍

The first notes of the opening credits started their haunting song, and it all faded away. ‍ ‍

Here was reality. Here was faith. Here was a gentle reminder from a loving Heavenly Father that I am not without a Captain. I am not only what I appear to be, and this life isn’t only what it appears to be. Something much bigger is going on.‍ ‍

That big picture reminder gave me perspective, real, raw, gritty perspective, and that gave me a pocket of rest. Endless phone calls and hospital bureaucracy eat away at your soul little by little because part of us knows that none of it matters in the end. I could spend every waking moment of my life collating data about my life for the powers that be, and in the end, at the moment of my death it would all cease to matter. Why am I spending any second of my life doing it? (That’s the living by sight question, and if we stay there, all it brings is anger, stress, depression, and fatalistic despair.) The Pacific said stop. This is not the only life you have to live. This is a blip on the radar of eternity. Stop. A war is being fought, and even if you can’t see it, it is happening. Stop. You already know who wins this war, so if you get wounded, broken, or even die, you are still safe, and your life still has a point, because none of this is what it seems. This is a testing, a proving, and an opportunity to not only follow your Captain and King, to trust him, but an opportunity to bless your husband, bless your church, and become more like Christ. See above the epic stress of your currently upended life, filled with your least favorite things stealing all your time and energy from your favorite things, to the reality of the war with sin, your fellow marines in the foxhole of life, and the Captain leading the way to victory. Have faith in Him even if all you can see is meaningless minutia. ‍ ‍

Rest. For a night, there was a pocket of rest when The Pacific started to play. ‍

Funny enough, when I went back and read War Stories Part 1 and 2, I found that I already had the answer to my psychoanalysis—War Stories make my faith sight for a small pocket of time.‍ ‍

War Stories are important to me on two levels. One, I simply and truly love stories about warriors, which means I love war movies and shows. You can’t have one without the other. Second, they are my favorite illustration for Christianity. War stories have a theological component to them that is important to me personally. It seems like I simply came out that from a slightly different perspective this time, but it is still true – the reason I find them restful is that they tangibly build my faith every time I watch them and they bolster my faith when I’m struggling. Now, let’s see if I can hold onto why I love war movies, or if I’ll be writing a fourth article in the future. ‍

[1] And just so you know, this isn’t just a show to me. This is history. I’ve read several of Leckie’s books, he’s one of my favorite writers. I’ve read With the Old Breed and plan to read it again. I’ve read biographies and the history of Basilone’s winning of the Medal of Honor. This isn’t just a show to me, I know these were real men doing very real and horrible things in a very real and horrible war.

[2] This show has such haunting and beautiful opening credits. I never skip it.

[3] Yes, I think watching the opening of Saving Private Ryan should just about be mandatory.

[4] John Owen

[5] Unfortunately, much of the ‘persecution’ we face is either because we didn’t handle ourselves correctly or behave in a wise manner. I’ve seen Christians on the internet, and most of us need to get off and shut up.

[6] Speaking as a citizen, not a Christian, this is my great cultural annoyance. We speak of freedom and spend so much of our lives filling out paperwork and making phone calls. Oh, yes. We’re obviously really free.

War Movies (Part 3)

The Oddity of the Inner Life of the Author: Behaving Normally