Yes, I’m working on the promised crossword puzzles. I know how you people pine so for them.

I was just accidentally watching Saving Private Ryan. I mean, I saw that it was on, and about an hour and a half into it, I started watching it. On TNT. With commercials, but not edited for content that I could tell.

I came in right around the time where they have that one German POW and the medic, Wade, Giovanni Ribisi, dies. “Oh my God, it’s my liver” and “I could use some more morphine” are the lines that stick with me, and far from just being Phoebe’s half-brother Frank Jr. on Friends, it became obvious that Giovanni Ribisi was really something else. I don’t think he’s yet found his killer role, the one that’ll make him remembered as a Great Actor, but he will.

But I kept watching, and we got to the town where they find Private Ryan, and they’re setting up their defenses and packing composition B into axle grease-coated socks, and Edward Burns and Adam Goldberg are snarking away … and we got to my favorite part. Barry Pepper. Jackson, the sniper. In the bell tower.

There’s a reason this is a seminal war movie, despite being less classic than The Longest Day and less emotional than Platoon and less dark than Apocalypse Now. I don’t know why, but in no other movie (except Band of Brothers on HBO [“We’re paratroopers. We’re supposed to be surrounded.”]) was I so moved and so impressed by what these guys knew.

Jackson in the bell tower uses hand signals to tell Captain Miller that there are two Tiger tanks, two Panzers, and 50-and-change infantry coming from the east. Later, he tells him there’s 30 infantry flanking to the left. Without a word. Wade knows he’s shot in the liver by where he’s bleeding worst and the size of the exit wound in the small of his back.

I don’t know why all war movies don’t show this kind of thing. Are we supposed to know without being told? Are we assumed to have been told by our fathers and our grandfathers that these 19-year-old kids really were taught what to do, that they weren’t just picked up off their front lawns, handed uniforms and rifles, and sent to France? Or are we meant to think that they were?

Most war movies show innocence lost, but not knowledge gained. Maybe I’m hopelessly naïve, but I wish we all knew without thinking about it what the country does for these guys first, that they aren’t sacrificial lambs. In this movie it’s a schoolteacher from Pennsylvania having read the field manual and paid attention to strategy and planning, because he knew that’s what would get him home alive if anything would. It’s a Southern redneck, who at first is made out to be too cocky for his own good, doing everything right, reciting prayers (“Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war”) while shooting over and over from that bell tower, rarely missing and always showing frustration on his brow at the eternal half-second between shots it takes him to eject a shell, screaming his last words to get Parker out of the tower before the tank round hits.

I guess it’s acting, that one part that really gets to me, but really it comes down to storytelling. I respect storytelling. But I wish I knew why Barry Pepper hasn’t gotten that Great Role yet either. I mean, Roger Maris in 61* and Dale Earnhardt in 3 are fine things to have done, but there’s only so much credit you can get for nonfiction roles in movies whose titles are numbers.

And I know full well I’m seven years late to be writing about Saving Private Ryan. Lisa and I talked about this years ago, but I don’t really remember whether she saw the same thing I did or not.