Sympathetic to black man, Lieutenant Maples

It would be a horrible burden for any man of any race to have to bear for the rest of his life...having mistakenly strafed a truck filled with civilian refugees. The movie sugarcoated the strafing because this was, 'pre-Saving Private Ryan' time. Fifty caliber heavy machine gun bullets don't drill neat little holes in the human body. Those heavy slugs chew and rip up human bodies like hamburger. The movie director just hired a bunch of people to lay down on the dirt road pretending to be dead.

Lieutenant Maples is thoroughly grounded with his faith and belief in God and the mysterious workings of His Will and why things happen the way they do. This allows Maples to come to terms with his mistake and to live with it. LTC Hess comes to lieutenant Maples' tent to console the man and in a surprising twist, it is Maples who consoles Hess and enables Hess to reconcile his own inner conflicts as a religious minister with that of a fighter pilot who killed the enemy and who five years ago accidentally killed 37 young Germany orphans with a stuck bomb that fell off his P-51 Mustang fighter plane.

I always found inspiration in Lieutenant Maples. Here is an Afro-American man and a lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force serving the United States, while back in the southern US there are still segregation signs all over the place. Yet Maples carried himself with such dignity and honor without falling into despair, bitterness and recrimination. You folks reading this post will probably not know much about American history, but a black man like LT Maples was better off remaining in the military as long as he could, where at least he could expect a reasonable modicrum of respect and career advancement rather than return to civilian life and the indignity still heaped upon blacks in the 1950s USA. Maples could possibly reach and retire at the rank of major or lieutenant colonel by the end of the 1960s.