For those of you who are diehard movie buffs like me, I’ve got a movie for you. Even if you don’t need to toss life to the side for a while to immerse yourself in a good flick, you just might find this one worth watching.
My favorite movies are the ones where I can’t look away; it was your mistake trying to talk to me while I was watching because I have no idea what you just said. My favorite thing about movies is that they offer the ability to learn a lot about something quickly, you just have to bear in mind it’s Hollywood’s version.
When my husband made the choice to join the military (a bit later in life for those not familiar with our history), I felt like I had to learn a lot in a short time. I didn’t know the first thing about the military, other than that my grandfather had served well before I was born. So I did what any movie buff would do. I got a list of “military movies” and vowed to watch them all with him so I wouldn’t watch them alone and cry that he would never come home again. From OSUT (One Station Unit Training) and Airborne School. It’s okay if you chuckled. I have since learned how laughable I was. I was also the wife binge-watching Army Wives convinced this, too, would help. Clueless, married for half my life, and two children in tow, I did what felt right at the time and what I thought would help me somewhat understand what my husband was getting into and our new way of life.
While I learned there was no need for me to watch Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down or binge-watch Army Wives, I was glad I did. It was like watching The Notebook as a 9-year-old and thinking I knew something about love. It gave me just a glimpse of things, enough for me to have an idea. Thinking back, I remember watching movies about Black history as a child with my aunt, to celebrate Black History Month. At the time, I felt like she was making me watch boring old movies and I was annoyed because they weren’t what I wanted to watch. But by the end I always really took something away—what segregation looked like, what times were like, and all that was done by such brave and honorable people to be where we are today. It was Hollywood’s version, but it gave me an idea, and made my interest grow.
When I discovered there was a movie about strong African American women in the military, I had to watch it. After watching, I was motivated to make sure others watch it too. The Six Triple Eight is a truly inspiring movie based on the exceptional women of the 6888th Central Post Directory Battalion, an all-female, all-Black Army unit formed in 1944. They were tasked with parsing through the long backlog of mail sent to military service members.
The main thing I noticed watching the movie was how little some may think their feats to be. It’s just mail. But in those times, and even today for military families, it is so much more than mail. Mail is morale. Mail is hope. Mail is everything when it is the only way to communicate with your soldier. While my husband completed OSUT and Airborne School, I knew my mailman on a first-name basis, the time the mail was due, and found the handy dandy postal mail tracker to know if I was racing home for mail only to find I didn’t receive anything from my husband that day.
These women faced such extreme circumstances, with 432 of the approximately 6,500 women losing their lives. They did incredible work that would go on to be barely recognized, until this remarkable Netflix film directed by Tyler Perry came about. These women, led by Army Major Charity Adams, faced adversity, stared it in the eye, defeated it, and did not ask for praise. Movies like Six Triple Eight remind me of the people we should be aspiring to follow in the footsteps of and the people we should be recognizing during Black History Month.
