Movies saved my life: A young New Yorker meets foreigners in film—By Tom Engelhardt (Harper’s Magazine)

Unlike most of my peers in the 1950s and early 1960s, I advanced with the U.S. Marines and the Russians, bombed Tokyo and witnessed Hiroshima after it was atomized. I took out Panzers, but for two hours one afternoon was a German boy willing to die as American tanks bore down on him. They confirmed in me a sense that the world was not as we were told, and that ours was not necessarily the most exceptional way of life.