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  | Nelson Column on WWII Soldier Published in News & Record 
Tom Nelson, an associate professor in the School of
Communications, had a
column published Oct. 10 in the News & Record on his
reflections of a new documentary by filmmaker Ken Burns.
Nelson describes watching the documentary and following the
story of a soldier named "Babe," from his days
after Pearl Harbor to the battlefields of Italy.
While many Americans tend to view World War II soldiers as
characters in novels or films, Nelson concludes, the
documentary was a reminder that tens of thousands of men and
women - people with families, and jobs, and lives they left
behind to fight tyranny - never returned from the
fight.
"Authors don't kill characters like Babe. At least,
American authors don't. But it was not Americans writing
this larger-than- life epic called World War II," he
wrote. "Other people had put their pen to page, and
the premise of their story would be murderous and its final
chapters dark as they often are in the literature of the Old
World."
The story of "Babe" ends in such a fashion.
"I find myself very angry that a noble, finely drawn
character such as Babe was wiped off the page so close to the
end of the story, just when you felt sure he would
survive," Nelson wrote. "Only, Babe is not a finely
drawn character on an author's page and the war that
claimed him was no novel. If only it were so." |
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| School of Communications 2850 Campus Box Elon, NC 27244-2010 (336) 278-5724 E-mail: communications@elon.edu | Copyright © Elon University |
