We were readers once, and young

Chris, Annie, and I took in “Dune 2” at the Capitol City Digital Cinemas LUXX Studio Theater. It’s new. Not quite as fancy as the ARQ Theater and a step up from one of the boring standard spaces. We sat in handicapped seating in the second row. There’s a first row but you have to recline and bend your neck to take it all in. The place wasn’t packed although there was a chatterbox who sat a few rows behind us. We took him out with one of those wicked Fremen bazookas. I enjoyed the movie, thankful that the story moved along quickly and I didn’t notice the passing of 180 minutes. Long movies used to have an intermission. That’s gone the way of Ben Hur’s chariot. I plan to write a nasty letter to someone about this.

In my youth (early 1970s), I was a Frank Herbert fan and read “Dune” and “Dune Messiah.” Many of my friends read the books. We were readers, absorbing Vonnegut, Heller, and Tolkien, even Heinlein. My roommate was a former outlaw biker from Milwaukee who had to leave his hometown for some reason he didn’t want to share. My landlord was a friend who lived next door in a matching concrete block house. He worked in construction. His roomie was my brother who also worked construction – there was a lot of it in Daytona Beach those days – and he eventually got fed up with banging nails and joined the USAF. I worked as an orderly in the county hospital by night and attended community college by day. We all were readers and enjoyed talking about books over beer and weed. On weekends, we were in and on the water.

“Lord of the Rings” was probably the favorite. Fantasy and adventure, cool characters like the Ents, Orcs, and Gandalf. We really had no sense that Mordor was created from Tolkien’s war memories. We knew about the war origins of Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” because he writes about it in the introduction. War had been on our minds quite a lot those days. I had not yet read the great novels by Vietnam vets as they didn’t yet exist. I had no concept of what war could do to the psyche. Tolkien fought in the far-off Great War and Vonnegut (and my father) were in the now-ancient war against totalitarianism. Those battles may loom large as this election season approaches.

“Dune” was a favorite because of the turmoil of Paul Atreides and the giant sandworms of Arrakis. That was the part of “Dune 2” that thrilled me and I could watch again. The Fremen and Paul ride the sandworms! Amazing special effects. Our seats shook. This was also my favorite part of the novel, Paul and the Sandworms. Herbert did a great job creating them and Denis Villenueve and crew recreated them wonderfully. These characters and creatures invented by writers and recreated on the screen became a part of us, a part of me.

One other result of all of this reading. We were steeped in satiric humor and (I haven’t yet mentioned “Catch-22”) the ridiculousness of being human. Billy Pilgrim reacts (or he doesn’t) as he time travels through absurdity. Yossarian does everything he can to cheat death. He is flummoxed at every turn. Paddling in a small boat from a small island in the Med to neutral Sweden may seem crazy until Yossarian finds out his tentmate Orr has accomplished it. He ridicules Orr throughout, wants to bonk him on the head for his endless fiddling with the tent stove and his absurd stories. He won’t fly with Orr because he crashes all the time. Turns out, that was Orr’s way of practicing for his desertion. Yossarian runs away in the book and sets out on a tiny dinghy in the movie. I thought it was unfortunate that in the last episode of Hulu’s “Catch-22,” Yossarian flies off on yet-another mission in a B-25.

I really liked “Masters of the Air.” I did wonder in one episode what Yossarian might make of the Bloody Hundredth. On one mission to Munster, only one of the unit’s planes makes it back to base. Earlier, we see others on fire and many airmen in their chutes trying to escape. The novel’s Yossarian spends three years in combat on 55 missions. His commanding officers want to make pilots fly 80 missions which means Yossarian may never get home. He runs.

Flying 80 combat missions may seem outrageous. Rosie in “Masters” flies his 25 missions and is cleared to go home. He tells his C.O. he will stay on to lend his experience to the new, untested pilots. The C.O. then tells him that the men will have to fly more missions and keep flying. They will be targets, a lure to bring up the Luftwaffe to get shot down by our swift long-range fighter planes like the  P-51 Mustang. The C.O. says something like “we plan to sweep the Luftwaffe from the skies for the coming invasion.” Rosie flies 52 missions and survives.

They were brave and many died. It does remind me of Yossarian’s observation: “The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.”