Amerika (1987)

Robert Urich: Peter Bradford

Photos 

Quotes 

• Peter Bradford : Damn, I'm so tired of this "I'm an American" bull! Where was all that patriotism when it counted? Where was that willingness to sacrifice? Nobody wanted to join the damn army to defend the country unless they got paid well! Nobody wanted to give any time to public service unless they could make a career out of it! And I didn't notice a lot of us giving up our lives in the last 10 years!

• Peter Bradford : If you'd landed troops on the beaches, maybe it would have been different.

  Colonel Andrei Denisov : What we did not expect was that, without communications, the United States would revert to a collection of separate peoples.

  Peter Bradford : You just got the drop on us.

  Colonel Andrei Denisov : [shaking off the suggestion]  I don't believe it. It worked because you lost your country before we ever got here.

• Colonel Andrei Denisov : Why do you wish to help us?

  Peter Bradford : I don't want to help you. I want to help my country.

  Colonel Andrei Denisov : [deadly serious]  There is no country.

• Peter Bradford : [Peter is at the Lincoln Memorial at night... voiceover]  My dearest Amanda... I'm writing to you now because I can't reach you, talk to you. It's become second nature to me to have you a part of everything I felt, or did... decisions I made. Everything has moved so fast since I got here... it's as though I'm suddenly so far from Milford that it's already a part of my past.

  [beat] 

  Peter Bradford : Maybe I should tell you about the President. What a sad man... but somehow there's something noble in the humiliation he's carried for us all. Maybe that's a greater service than leading an army into battle. Who knows. I wonder about myself... the choices I suddenly have. What if they're the wrong ones? What struck me is I'm about to become a part of a system where some future generation is going to rebel against. I'll be hated by people I don't even know... who don't understand why something was done... just as all the kids growing up now don't have any idea of the difference between the symbol of Abraham Lincoln and what he actually stood for. You can't look at those eyes and not think of what being an American has meant. Now there's an end to it. Soon, there will be no America. We'll be history, quickly lost and distorted, like Mr. Lincoln himself... I don't know. I think of Jackie and Scott... we wanted to protect them. Maybe we were trying not to infect them with our ideas, which seemed to have gone so wrong. I suppose there will have to be new revolutions, with new generations who will have to discover the values which our forefathers handed down to us. If those truths stop being real, maybe it's better to let them go, to let some new generation discover, as though for the first time. Maybe freedom is just one of those things you can't inherit.