I know little more of war than what I’ve read in books, and the books that seemed to me truthful have in the main been written by old soldiers who’ve had time to think: Tolstoy, for example, in the Battle of Borodino chapters of War and Peace, where the ignorance of the commanders contrasts nicely with the ignorance of the fighting men in a battle that need never have been fought; or Robert Graves’s Good-Bye to All That, his 1929 recollection of trench warfare as death-dealing farce: the soldiers rising in the night from the trench on command but smack into the coincidental sweep of fire from a distant German machine gun, and falling back like dropped dolls, only to be scolded by their commander, standing nearby in the darkness and stillness, as cowards.

Less well known than these authors is Paul Fussell, who first caught me with his The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975), an award-winning treatment of literature, culture, and history that is also written in prose so bristly with style that the book’s credibility seems to come to rest not only on the ample citations that support the work on one end but on the five spare lines that open it at the other: “To the Memory of/ Technical Sergeant Edward Keith Hudson, ASN 36548772/ Co. F, 410th Infantry,/ Killed beside me in France/ March 15, 1945.”

Fussell’s thesis in this book about the First World War—in which he did not fight—is that its participant-chroniclers, such as Graves and his fellow trench-dwellers Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Edmund Blunden, changed forever the way war is remembered. These men, he writes, scorned the centuries-old “ritual of military memory” that reads back order, honor, and dignity into what sentient and honest and moral soldiers since stone-hatchet days have seldom experienced as anything but a set of incoherent, fear- and rage-filled accidents.

And so World War I, Fussell argues, not only brought us World War II but a tradition of war writing that did not neglect maggots, the clap, hatred for officers, the malevolent lies of statesmen, and the way young soldiers, when wounded, tend to murmur “Mom.” When his book was published, Fussell had the examples of Norman Mailer, James Jones, Irwin Shaw, and Joseph Heller to offer as evidence, though not yet the hundreds of soldier-memoirists, journalists, and moviemakers who would try to wrest truth from what Library of Congress content specialists categorize, with precision, as “Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975.”

Fussell, who also writes books about Samuel Johnson, 17th-century literature, and American culture, wasn’t done with war, however, and entered the slips again in 1989, with Wartime (Oxford). There, under a subtitle—“Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War”—that would seem to harbor the work of a sociologist who’s been probing survey data with a long stick, Fussell presents 18 obstreperous and scholarly essays on the power of war to kill truth. His subjects include rumor, concealment of accidental deaths, mental breakdown under fire, habits of reading and copulation and drunkenness among soldiers, and experiences—such as slowly sliding down hills of slippery corpses while trying to climb them to get at the enemy—that do not appear in Life Goes to War, a 1977 volume of Life Magazine photographs that Fussell has studied closely. A war that brings forth movies, books, Broadway musicals, and photographic essays that do not present shattered bodies, he writes, is a war draped in “publicity and euphemism”; it has not been turned to the only use that can possibly redeem human suffering, which is moral use.

That’s what I’ve read. Here’s something I heard. My father served for three years as an officer during World War II and never spoke of his experience in my hearing unless it was to mention the fine people he encountered while bivouacked in Birmingham during the run-up to D-Day, his discovery that the French fed cucumbers to horses, and the happiness of liberated concentration camp survivors. Anything else that he might have witnessed during the Third Army’s 281 push through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia remained unspoken. And then one day—I may have been 13 or 14—I was sitting in the living room of our house, reading, and heard my father, in the kitchen, on the telephone. He did not know I was there (and never knew) and I don’t know to whom he was talking, but I assume it was another veteran (our world was thick with them) and he was telling a story of a gathering convened by General George S. Patton just before the Third Army crossed into Germany. “And Patton,” I heard my father saying, “was standing there with his pistols [they were ivory handled and famous], and he said—and here my father’s voice rose to a shout—’And when we get to Berlin, we’re going to [violate] every goddamn fraulein!’” The word he used where I have put “violate” was a far cruder word, an obscenity in common use today, but not so in 1961, at least within earshot of me, and a word I had never heard my father speak previously and would never hear him speak again. My father went on to say more into the telephone about the day the Third Army crossed the Rhine, but I don’t recall any of it because I was too stunned to pay attention: stunned by the import of the story, yes, but more profoundly by the obscenity spoken by my father in our kitchen—a collision of moral structures that I now understand as another truth about war, this one framed by an old soldier who wasn’t planning on writing any books but who knew what he didn’t want his children to have to know.

Our story on Martin Dockery’s experience of the “Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975,” begins here.

Ben Birnbaum

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