Op-Ed: I almost died in Afghanistan. And yet I still love war movies

The premiere of “Top Gun: Maverick,” at the USS Midway in San Diego. My interest in war movies — and the history they capture — began in middle school, when my grandmother gave me a VHS copy of Michael Mann’s 1992 epic “Last of the Mohicans.” It depicted hand-to-hand Colonial warfare at its most brutal and demonstrated guerrilla warfare against a conventional army. And then, as I lay near death in Afghanistan 11 years later, I found myself thinking of a scene from another World War II drama, Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan.” A young medic who was shot through the liver knows he’s dying; his life is bleeding away. That’s one reason I see value in current popular movies like “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Operation Mincemeat,” which are, if not war films, at least military-themed. After that era came films devoting more attention to the horrors of war, or showing them unflinchingly: “Forrest Gump,” “The Thin Red Line,” “Flags of Our Fathers,” “Black Hawk Down.” War movies also remind us what our fathers and grandfathers — as well as our grandmothers, as in “The Best Years of Our Lives” — went through so we could live in peace.