Thanks, LH, I appreciated your response, because you took it as I meant it. I recall watching a biography of Yamamoto, the Admiral who engineered the attack on Pearl Harbor while apparently advising against it. It was pretty respectful of him as a man.

I think I'd go so far as to say I can respect some of these people. I won't go far enough to honor them if I don't respect their cause. These young men are as you say, but they are quite aware that they are trying to kill other young men.

And I agree with your facts about Lee. He was fighting for Virginia. I think that was 'old' thinking, and a very poor decision. But it was a common one across the South. As the novelist/ would-be historian Shelby Foote observed during the wonderful Burns series on the Civil War (which came out just before Gulf War I and was repeated just before Gulf War II), before the Civil War people said "The Unites States ARE" and after the war people said "The United States IS".

There is a propensity to judge people outside of their place and time, and blame them for things that were part of their environment when they grew up. Then there is the counter-impulse to allow people the defects of their state, and not blame them for anything.

I think the truth, of course, is somewhere between. And I think Band of Brothers is a work of art because it shows us this without preaching at us. Specifically, it shows Americans shooting enemy soldiers who in a more PC production might be properly seen as prisoners. It shows Germans as human beings, too. It shows an American soldier getting drunk and shooting Germans, an English officer, and an American (the American gets saved by a German surgeon). It rises above mere hooray-for-our-side, while taking full advantage of it, an American characteristic.

The above scenes I mentioned are right out of the book, but have language and depictions that are not spelled out in the book. I am curious as to whether this was creative writing, 'fleshing out' characters, or whether the writers of the series went back to original sources (the men) and incorporated additional information into the episodes.