The Department of Veterans Affairs took more than 100 calls on its counseling line from veterans seeking professional help after seeing the movie. Some veterans of D-Day were reportedly unable to sit through the film's D-Day scenes and instead had to leave the theater. Saving Private Ryan's historical accuracy in the opening sequence has been praised by both WWII historians and survivors of the D-Day landings. Like the real-life Fritz Niland, the movie's Private Ryan was a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division. He became the inspiration for Matt Damon's character, Private James Francis Ryan. After the Army learned of their deaths, the youngest brother, Fritz Niland, was extracted from France and sent back to the U.S. Ambrose's book described a similar family and its sons, the Niland brothers, two of whom had died in WWII (a third was believed to have been killed in action but was liberated from a Japanese POW camp a year later). Rodat was stunned when he noticed the repeated last names of brothers who had died in combat. While he was in the middle of reading the book, he came across a war memorial monument in a small New Hampshire village.

The initial idea for Saving Private Ryan came about in 1994 when the wife of screenwriter Robert Rodat gave him Stephen Ambrose's bestseller D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II. War Stories: Mark Cousins talks to Steven Spielberg As for the rescue of Private James Ryan, that portion of the movie was loosely inspired by a similar real-life scenario, the 1944 extraction of Sergeant Frederick 'Fritz' Niland. 'The story of Saving Private Ryan is really the story of a terrible tragedy that happens on June 6, 1944,' says director Steven Spielberg, 'not just the tragedy of D-Day, but the tragedy of brothers killed in action very close to the same day, a couple of them on the same day.' The movie's depiction of the D-Day landing is the most historically accurate part of the film.

That's because while it was inspired by a similar scenario, most of what unfolds after the D-Day scenes in the movie is fictional. The movie doesn't explicitly state that Saving Private Ryan is based on a true story or whether Private James Francis Ryan is a real person. Is Saving Private Ryan based on a true story?

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