Before any flames, I say this as the son of a man who landed on Utah Beach. He passed on long before Saving Private Ryan came out, but I once saw him crying his eyeballs out while watching The Longest Day.
My Dad flew combat in WW2, Korea and Vietnam.
He never talked about war. Before he left for Vietnam, I asked him what it was like.
“You’re always dirty, always tired, but you’ve got a job to do and you do it.”
I asked him if he had killed anyone. He stared at his 13 year old son like I was a Martian, replied “Yes”, then walked out of the room. He died in a helicopter crash south of Saigon about 9 months later.
He hated war. But he never gave any indication that he felt bad about having fought in them, either.
All of my uncles were the same. The only one who wasn’t in the military was in the Merchant Marine, and had two ships sunk while he was on them. An explosion blew him off a third, and they recovered him alive from the north Atlantic nearly a day later. No one knew how he survived, and he had no memory of the explosion or of his time in the water.
All of them hated war, but none of them doubted they did the right thing.
That is the part of modern movies that doesn’t fit. All the self-doubts, the whining, all the “Why did we do it” - NONE of my uncles felt that way.