Brigadier General Amend

Brigadier General Amend was a secondary character in the movie Private Ryan. He was a brigadier general in the US Army during World War II. He commanded the 327th glider division and second in command of the 101st Airborne Division. He was killed when they crashed on the landing, along with twenty-two other men in their glider.

Lieutenant Dewindt said that the reason why they crashed was because of two big metal plates strapped onto the base of their plane to keep the general safe from ground fire. But this backfired as no one told Dewindt. Since he didn't know until they were getting airborne, he was basically flying a freight train. If the General had never been on that plane, the plates would have never been strapped to the plane, meaning twenty-two soldiers lives could have been spared. This caused Miller and his men to claim the mission as  "F.U.B.A.R.".

The General's corpse was still in the plane after D-Day along with six other soldiers.

The deaths of several soldiers due to an attempt to protect the general paralleled what Miller and his squad were doing for Private Ryan, symbolically correlating with the men's view that it was futile since they would all die while searching for Ryan, the event foreboding their eventual encounter with Ryan.