“This Ryan better be worth it. He'd better go home, cure some disease, or invent a longer-lasting light bulb or something.”
Capt. Miller receives orders to put together a small detachment of soldiers for the express and singular purpose of saving some unknown private named Ryan. Miller has never heard of Ryan. Nobody has. Ryan is of absolutely no strategic value to the war effort whatever. The order to penetrate enemy territory and save him is purely politically motivated. Capt. Miller in this quote is expressing the insanity of this seemingly arbitrary decision to risk eight men just to save the life of one man. The quote serves to underline that the mission is not to save someone with valuable secret information or a soldier who has become famous because of acts of heroism. There is nothing in Ryan’s life up to this point that makes his life worth any more than any other soldier, especially those tasked with saving him. Miller’s only hope for justifying the recklessness of this order is the promise the future holds and even he realizes this is wishful thinking. Perhaps Ryan’s life isn’t worth the sacrifice now, but if he goes on to do something great as a result of surviving the war, perhaps the sacrifice will have been worth it.
“James, earn this... earn it.”
The entire thematic arc of the film challenges the notion that any one single life is worth sacrificing the life of someone else, much less the lives of multiple people. The very act of saving Private Ryan seems not just random and unequal, but unusually unfair. Right from the very beginning of the film’s flashback to World War II this random inequality is illustrated, but it is only in the particular case of Ryan that it rises to the truly unfair. Miller is saying this to Private Ryan as his last words before he dies. He has accomplished his mission of saving the private but at a huge cost to his men and himself. The unfairness of the situation is clearly on Miller’s mind even as he is close to death. His last thoughts are all about this. He knows that Ryan has done nothing special to deserve being saved at the cost of the lives of others who have done more. Miller uses his last breaths in part to make Ryan understand the full scope of the sacrifice that was made for him. He hadn’t earned being saved by doing anything special before the mission. So Miller wants to do all he can to make sure that the mission wasn’t completely pointless by urging Ryan to do something with his life to make sure he earns the privilege. Not necessarily anything momentous, but simply something that will earn him the right to have been saved.
“You know if going to Rumelle and finding him so that he can go home. If that earns me the right to get back to my wife, then that's my mission.”
This is a quote that would be almost inconceivable in a movie made about World War II for most the history of Hollywood. One of the messages the film conveys is that being a soldier is not about trying to be a hero. The central focus of everyone who comes under fire in battle is merely to survive and go home alive. Acts of heroism are suggested to be mostly accidental and very tangential to the actual personal mission of a soldier which is survival. If the film has any traditional hero at all, it is Capt. Miller. He is portrayed as a leader of men who respect him. But he is also a reminder that most of the heroes of World War II were not professional soldiers but men leading average lives back home who responded when called upon to fight. This quote serves to illustrate with surprising clarity the difference between realistic portraits of such men and the romanticized version of them found in most war movies. Miller does not even view his mission as being to save Private Ryan. The attempt to save Ryan is just as aspect of his true mission to survive the war and go home alive and with his mind and body intact. There is no Hollywood-style heroism in that, but there is truth.
