Saving Private Ryan: Is anyone else disgusted by the fact that the crying guy on the stairs let his friend die?

The real problem with that movie is the fact the in the opening scene there is an old man at a graveyard looking at what is assumed to be a friend of his who died in war and the camera focuses into his eyes and end up showing tom hank's experience on D-day, but at the end of the movie it shows that the old man a the graveyard is actually Ryan, so he couldn't have been at D-day because he was in a completely different area of the world when D-day was happening so he wouldn't be able to have any idea of what happened at D-day, so the movie cheats the audience by showing a character that is believed to survive dying and switching the character with someone who live without taking away scenes that the living character couldn't have seen. Pardon the run-on.