My old watchmaker (a 37th Division veteran of WW2) also cited that as a reason why he would never watch any war movie after he came home from the war. Not just the smells, but things like stripping the dead of their equipment and uniforms because your own were rotting apart in the field.
Agree, things you can’t unsee and undo. Why dredge those locked vaults of the mind?.
I suppose if a real movie of the horrors of war were to be shown, people would cry out for peace? I would hope so.