It‘s easy to say "war is hell." That gets the point across, but being such a shopworn phrase -- particularly when invoked by warmongers who follow it up with all the reasons it‘s still something to be engaged in whenever possible -- it doesn‘t nearly capture the magnitude of human suffering it causes. Words will always fail.

But somehow, the men and women whom Ken Burns and co-director Lynn Novick interviewed for his quietly shattering 15-hour World War II documentary series The War convey that sentiment, in all its ugly terror, in a mostly quiet and humble manner that is ultimately more unsettling than all the superlatives and adjectives one could hurl at such a world-engulfing event. The first episode, "A Necessary War," concludes with a Marine talking about a firefight during which a soldier was hit and spent hours screaming in agony. The Marine wished the man would just die; only to discover later, after the man died, that it was his best friend. "It‘s the pits" is all he can manage to say about that moment of devastation, and in his voice you can hear all the pain of those desolate decades of scratching, clawing guilt.

Stretched over seven episodes, The War is quite a different piece of work than Burns‘ career-defining and genre-reinventing series The Civil War. One of his motivating purposes for getting the series done was reportedly his desire to get as many of these first-person accounts of the conflict down on film while there were still enough veterans and civilians alive to tell them. This focus on being told what happened by those who were actually there gives the series a wholly different perspective than the Civil War, which by necessity had to utilize historian talking-heads and the narration of first-person accounts. While that series hardly skimped on the grungy details, the soothing voices, gentle music, and sepia-tone feel of the whole thing allowed viewers a little more distance.

There is no such distance in