This sounds very sensitively and thoroughly done, and I particularly appreciate what you've said about the relationship between Al and Milly ( true proof of love is its uncertainty--that's a pretty staggering throwaway insight, yo!) and between Homer and Wilma. But oh GOD, I resent about historical war movies the fact (and it is a fact, so I suppose I'm resenting reality) that it's the men who have had the honor and the terror of serving and suffering, and the women... must just react to them. Leave them or stand by them, understand them or fail to understand them.

I will one day write a story in which a man's going off to war was a cowardly escape from something tricky he didn't want to face at home--maybe a child born with a disability to his lover--and where the woman must struggle and be heroic on her own--maybe, herself, in a war zone, while he meanwhile whiles away the war at a desk job--and then he wants to come home and marry her and collect for himself a ready-made family (for some ignoble reason) but she, meanwhile, will have found the love of someone worthy and will have no time for him.