If you’re a guy and a movie buff, Memorial Day weekend is always a fine thing. Television trots out the war movies.

My favorite kinds of movies are gangster movies, prison movies and war movies. It’s a guy thing. My girlfriend, who has been a soldier’s mother, is no great fan of war movies but indulged me.

On Monday afternoon, I watched “Patton,” among the best war movies ever made. George C. Scott actually gave a fairly nuanced performance, no mean feat when you’re portraying an outsized character like George Patton. It’s got a kick-butt theme song. It shows both the grand strategies of battle and the spilled blood. As a guy, you can almost feel your body hair grow as you watch it (Richard Nixon famously invaded Cambodia after seeing it).

Of course, it’s a movie, so you can’t be sure how accurate or even how true to life – they’re not the same thing – it is, but from what little I know about Patton, it smells pretty good. Of course, it’s a fairly positive portrait and somebody like Patton was, to say the least, a bit polarizing. There’s a prominent person in Fargo-Moorhead (whose name I won’t tell here, because I didn’t clear it with him) whose father was the minister who actually turned Patton in for slapping the soldier. I asked the son about it after I found out and he replied drily, “He didn’t have a lot of good things to say about Patton.” He probably wasn’t alone.

But then, nobody who’s ever actually been there has a lot good to say about war in general. And I watch war movies with some sense of trepidation.

I’ve never been in the military. My Dad was a World War II Marine and my brother was in Vietnam, but the closest I’ve ever come to actually being in battle is playing army as a boy. When you get hit doing that, you just go home for milk and cookies afterwards.

I’m also fascinated by military history and read a lot of it. If you find the right kind, it really gives you an idea of what it would have been like to be there. And while the sweep of history can be interesting, the kind of history that tells you what it was like for the average person is what most captivates me.

The problem is, when it comes to war, no book or movie or interactive experience can really tell you how it was. The individual experience of war is in the end mostly an experience of the heart and soul. It is not something one can even approach through everyday experience.

I once interviewed a remarkable man who had been in World War II, Korea and Vietnam and came out of those experiences a confirmed pacifist. I told him I had heard that when you get into battle, for some reason fear disappears. That was, he told me, wrong (although he used the more pungent term). You are scared silly the entire time.

While I think every soldier who serves deserves the highest honors, it bothers me when I see people use the military to whip Americans up into patriotic fervor, or just romanticize it. It always bothers me at air shows, for example, when a jet fighter does a fly-by and the announcer calls it “beautiful.” I suppose in some sense it is, but only if you’re not on the business end of the weaponry. After all, it’s a machine designed solely for the purpose of killing people. I’m not sure the world “beautiful” applies.

But what really burns me is the way this country craps all over its soldiers and veterans. I’m not talking about what happened after Vietnam, where it was even money a veteran would get honors or crap on the streets. One of the few good outcomes of Vietnam is that it finally taught people to honor the warriors even if they didn’t agree with the war.

No, I’m talking about the people in charge and how they treat our soldiers in ways both large and small. I am absolutely astonished that a single American soldier has ever had to personally foot the bill for body armor. And there are no words to say how disgusted I was when I found out that returning soldiers actually have to pay part of their own way home. Hell, those people should be dropped by limousine at their front door. That ain’t going to happen, but it at least shouldn’t cost them a red penny to get back to the loved ones they had forsaken for at least a year to live and work where death could come at any moment. It’s worse than disgusting that we don’t do that; it’s just plain wrong.

And I don’t say that for just a cheap applause line. Somebody who has some power really needs to address these things. But they won’t. It’s much more politically profitable to wave the flag, or the bloody shirt, than to do anything to make sure more shirts aren’t bloodied or that we thank the people who really pay the big bill. Pardon my cynicism, but go ahead – prove me wrong.

That’s one reason why I’m glad this column is running after Memorial Day, after the parades and ceremonies and encomiums. Especially in a time of war, even a war we never should’ve been in, every day should be Memorial Day.

So I’ll go back to watching my war movies, secure in the knowledge that they might entertain me (sort of obscene in itself, if you think about it). But I also realize that the lowliest supply clerk at Fort Leonard Wood has done more for his country than I ever did.

Thanks, ladies and gentlemen of the military. Thanks more than these poor words can ever say.