In Steven Spielberg's «Saving Private Ryan,» thousands of terrified and
seasick men, most of them new to combat, are thrown into the face of withering German fire.
And he distrusted the kind of person who'd take one look at another
man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, «Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left - handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,» and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a
man's boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a
man who was wearing his old clothes because he'd been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen * and in fact got
seasick on a wet pavement.