Brigadier General Amend

Brigadier General Amend was a minor character in the film, Saving Private Ryan. He was a Brigadier General in the US Army during World War Two. He commanded the 327th Glider division and was killed when they crashed landed during a storm, despite twenty two men trying to save him by sacrificing themselves in their glider.

Lieutenant Dewindt said that the reason why they crashed in the storm 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 did not know until they are 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 that 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 the six other soldiers.

The acts of the several soldiers that attempted to save him paralleled what Miller and his squad are doing for Private Ryan, symbolically correlating with the men's view that it was futile since they would all die while searching for Ryan which was the event foreboding their eventual encounter with Ryan.