Yearning for war: what I learned from watching A Bridge Too Far

Recently, I watched the 1977 film, A Bridge Too Far, starring, well, pretty much every hot male actor in Hollywood at that time (Sean Connery, Robert Redford, Gene Hackman, Michael Caine, Elliott Gould, Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Olivier, Ryan O'Neal, etc.)

The film depicts the attempt by the Allied forces in WW2 to strike a decisive final blow against the Nazis by carrying out a daring, multi-faceted massive surprise attack that was known as Operation Market-Garden (cool BBC animation here). For a bunch of reasons, including the unwillingness of military higher ups to take heed of intelligence warnings that indicated the plans might fail, Market Garden ended up being a bust, and many thousands of soldiers died in the process.

But for all the questions A Bridge Too Far raises about modern warfare, I didn't see it as a purely "anti-war" film. It glorified the war, the soldiers, and the excitement of the attempt to pull off Market Garden even as it critiqued the human foibles that led to …