The movie Saving Private Ryan contains one of my favorite movie exchanges. If you remember the movie, Tom Hanks character has led a group of men away from the D-Day beaches to look for one single soldier in order to send him home. Along the way, 2 of their friends have been killed trying to find this man. When they do, the solder (played by Matt Damon) refuses to go with them, demanding to stay with his unit to fulfill his mission. Hanks’ character is unsure what to do next…leave him, kidnap him, or maybe there is some other thing? So, he walks away with his Sargent, played masterfully by Tom Sizemore. Here is their exchange:
Sergeant Mike: What are your orders, sir?
Captain Miller: Sergeant, we have crossed some sort of strange boundary here. The world has taken a turn for the surreal.
Sergeant Mike: Clearly, but the question still stands.
Captain Miller: I don’t know. What do you think?
Sergeant Mike: You don’t want to know what I think.
Captain Miller: No, Mike, I do.
Sergeant Mike: Well, part of me thinks the kid’s right–what’s he done to deserve this. He wants to stay here, fine, let’s leave him and go home.
Captain Miller: Yeah.
Sergeant Mike: But, then another part of me thinks, what if my some miracle, we stay, and actually make it out of here. Some day we might look back on it and decide that, saving private Ryan was the one decent thing we were able to pull out of the god-awful, shitty mess.
That’s what I was thinking sir. Like you said, Capt, we do that, we all earn the right to go home.
Captain Miller: Oh brother.
If you’ve seen the movie, you know they stay and most of them die in the process. Crossing the boundary into the surreal. Sounds like the makings of a good band name or a short story. Sounds a lot like the world in which I live right now. Yet, that was where they found themselves. If they just left him, they might get in trouble when they get back to the beach. Even if not, they’d know that they ultimately failed in their quest. Staying, though the hard thing, was the right thing.
Often in life, doing the hard thing is simply, well, too hard. Many won’t do it. Yet, that’s what most of life is…doing a hard thing. If you wish to make it through right, through with no regrets, no guilt, you must do the hard thing.
Faithful presence….that’s really what the Sergeant is reminding the Captain. We are called to be true to a faithful presence, being there even in the land of the surreal.
I know it’s hard, but you can do it! Stay and defend that bridge. Stay on mission. Faithfully present…in the land of the surreal, where to do right is to do the hard thing.