Should Be Shown on a Double Bill with "Schindler's List" SPOILERS FOR BOTH

From its opening 20-minute D Day massacre-with-victory to its final brutal killings in war, Saving Private Ryan is perhaps the most grueling, visceral and violent war movie ever made -- a bit of a surprise from Steven Spielberg , who so often catered to a family audience.

The movie placed a lot of us "non-military people" into the shoes, I'd say , of the young man who has no interest in fighting or killing -- he's a bit of a coward, and his cowardice helps him survive. And we identify with him -- "Would that be ME when the prospect of death was imminent?" In a moment of bitter irony near the end, the coward "finds his bravery" by killing an un-armed Nazi and avenging his dead comrade. And it just seems self-serving.

But the other men on the squad do the usual brave soldier things -- and most of them die, and pretty much all in extremely slow, graphic, and painful ways.

And yet the movie ends modern-day on a highly patriotic note. Justifable after all that carnage and loss of life?

I'd say: yes.

And its the movie that Spielberg directed five years before Saving Private Ryan that makes the case.

Schindler's List gives us the Holocaust "up close and personal," and graphic and mercilessly and is, in its own way, just as brutal and ugly as Saving Private Ryan.

A key element to Schindler's List is how the Nazis -- once given control over Jewish lives and the lives of other "non-persons" -- are merciless in killing these people as a matter of fact. Even aside from the gas ovens, there are scenes in which Nazis simply pull out their pistols and shoot Jews for whatever offense bugs them.

Looming above all of it is Ralph Fiennes in his Oscar winning performance as the psychotic concentration camp commander Amon Goeth - who shoots Jews from his porch with a rifle just for kicks and offers mercy to no one -- unless they are on Schindler's List.

It is greatly satisfiying to watch the American GIS come in to liberate the camps -- and to subject Goeth to a perfunctory no-nonsense hanging -- with no honor afforded him -- as if stomping on a particularly repugnant spider.

And that's where Saving Private Ryan comes in.

The two movies, taken together , say: "If the US wanted to end the atrocities of Schindler's List, they had to subject American fighting men and women to the atrocities of Saving Private Ryan."

We ask ourselves again today: could OUR generation sacrifice itself like that?

Of course, times change. War has become less desirable in America, there is no draft, the gory conflicts of other nations are of no particular consequence to America.

But back then....something had to be done. And Saving Private Ryan reminds us that war (of that nature) is NEVER "easy to pull off." It took that fight to end the Holocaust -- and to end the destruction of nations that was coming everyone's way without a fight.