Military memoirs are as much a by-product of armed conflict as the veterans who write them, and as with veterans their status in society can be controversial, their meanings a cultural battleground. Military memoirs are first-person narratives about the experiences of participation with armed forces, written as non-fiction and published as books for public consumption. Military memoirs have always been a key constituent of the literature of war. From the earliest written accounts of the classical world such as Julius Caesarâs The Conquest of Gaul and classics of the canon of war-writing such as T.E. Lawrenceâs Seven Pillars of Wisdom, to contemporary best-sellers such as Anthony Swoffordâs Jarhead, they constitute an enduringly popular genre.1 Yet military memoirs are enigmatic artefacts of war. They present themselves to the world as first-person narratives, but also invite questions about authorship and provenance because of the distance we tend to imagine between popular ideas of âsoldierâ and âwriterâ (notwithstanding the literary reputations of some First World War memoirists).2 Military memoirs are promoted as experiential accounts of war, but provoke questions about the truth and veracity of the experiences the author relates and the distinctions which can be drawn between fiction and non-fiction, fabrication and fact.3 They are authoritative accounts of war by military personnel, the actual practitioners of war, but also prompt arguments about their authorsâ perspectives on war. That these are more than just academic issues is evident in their cultural influences. As John A. Wood noted with reference to Vietnam War memoirs, because of their enduring prevalence and popularity, these veteransâ accounts undoubtedly influenced Americaâs collective memory of the Vietnam conflict for decades.4 Whilst this is true of other cultural products and other media forms, âwar narratives by âthose who were thereâ have long held a special authority for people, Americans included.â5 This leads to questioning of the ways in which the positioning of military memoirs in the market and in literary analyses might privilege the voices, stories and experiences of war by trained military operatives over those of others, such as politicians, journalists and particularly the civilian casualties of armed conflict. Published military memoirs, until the widespread use of the internet and World Wide Web, necessarily appeared as commercial products, as war experiences in the material form of a published book for sale, and so bring with them questions about the ethics and morality of selling stories of war experience as entertainment for a mass market. With the development of digital communications technologies, this question of the mass consumption of military experience for entertainment purposes persists, with reference to additional media formats. As entertainment and as the focus of commercial investment and promotion, whether intended as such or not by their authors, military memoirs have an inherent potential for the celebration of state-sanctioned armed violence and militarism, even whilst they decry war and its consequences. Thus, for all that some readers engage with them as authoritative sources of knowledge and understanding about war directly from those who have participated in it, memoirs are for others largely propagandist nonsense, unworthy of critical attention and dismissed as a form of cultural militarisation, or still others as solely subjective accounts of little value in comparison with supposedly objective state sources and official histories by suitably qualified military historians. In short, although as Wood concludes, âby âtelling it like it wasâ and encouraging other generations of ex-soldiers to do the same, veteran memoirists have nevertheless enhanced our understanding of the true nature of war,â there is still little consensus about the value of the contemporary military memoir.6
It is this lack of consensus about a diverse genre which makes the military memoir so fascinating as an object of study. In Bringing War to Book, we are interested in the ways in which military memoirs report factual and experiential information about military participation, and in this book, we want to take them seriously, on their own terms, as they do so. We are also interested in the ways in which the facts and experiences they report are mediated in the telling, a process of communication which is subject to interventions by a range of influencesânot least those of the author. In short, we are interested in the military memoir as the outcome of social production and as a social artefact, and it is this which constitutes the focus of Bringing War to Book.
What is a military memoir, though? The lack of consensus about this diverse genre is hinted at in the existing literature on war-writing. Alex Vernon talks of âno genreâs landâ, noting the various genres at play within personal war narratives, including not just memoir and autobiography, but also poetry and various online media, and he also makes the point about the significant presence of oral and visual formats in descriptions of war.7 Samuel Hynesâ focus is more specific, seeing military memoirs (he uses the term war narratives) as a sub-genre of autobiographies of combat soldiers writing about a specific (war-time) period.8 Alternatively, Kate McLoughlin takes âwar writingâ to be that which is not identifiable solely with âthat written by a combatant, produced contemporaneously or related to events on the battlefieldâ.9 In the broader perspective of the twenty-first century, the terminology of armed conflict is increasingly adopted to account for other forms of armed violence in addition to conventional warfare.10 What becomes clear when defining a military memoir is the extent to which the underlying context and purposes of analysis shape the definition. Engaging directly with historiansâ traditional disregard for the memoir, Philip Dwyer in âmaking sense of the muddleâ opens his edited collection on the literature of war by defining a war memoir as a story told from an entirely different perspective to that of the historian or the senior military autobiographer, as at its most basic âthat of the common soldier or civilian who has little or no control over the events that they are caught up inâ.11 McLoughlin and others, writing from a literary studies perspective, have a focus on the text of the memoir in relation to other textual materials. The disciplinary context of Bringing War to Book is neither historical nor literary studies, but rather is social scientific. We came to be interested in military memoirs as a source of sociological data for understanding military experience in the round, and from that we came to be interested in how that data sourceâthe published first-person narratives of individuals engaged in military activitiesâcomes into being. So our interest in accounts of military personnel in armed conflictâhow war is brought to book, one could sayâfocuses on the nature and content of factual accounts. For example, our interest is in personal accounts such as Chantelle Taylorâs in Bad Company of her involvement with wounded personnel from both sides of the Afghanistan conflict, and what this tells us in turn about how stories such as hers enter the public domain, rather than the fictional experiences of literary creations such as Tolstoyâs Russian army officer Prince Andrei and his distribution of gold to his soldiers rather than attending to their wounds, whatever the undoubted literary, philosophical and aesthetic qualities of Tolstoyâs fiction and what this tells us about war and peace.12
In this chapter, we define the sole form of text with which Bringing War to Book is concerned, the contemporary military memoir. We start by introducing the genre, and its twin goals of telling stories rooted in factual information about military participation, and presenting narratives which prioritise the individual, lived experience of that participation in texts which claim authenticity on the basis of the witnessing of events recounted. We continue this introduction by discussing the diversity of the genre and exploring the range of types of military memoir that our immersion in the genre has revealed. We then outline three ideas which frame the social production of the military memoir and which thread through this book. These are the extent and limits of communicative possibility in these books, the role of paratext in these text-based accounts, and the way what we term âmilitary literacyâ functions to help explain the journey so many individuals make, from military operative to published author. We conclude with an overview of the subsequent chapters, each framed by a specific question about military memoirs. In answering these questions, we show how accounts of war and military life in preparation for it are both figuratively and literally brought to book.
Military Memoirs and the Facts and Experiences of War
Military memoirs are in some ways a straightforward genre. The genre comprises books which give their readers two things: first, factual information about military activities, and second, experientially derived reflection written on the basis of first-hand participation within military forces, which in turn is the basis of claims to authenticity. In bookshops, material and digital, they are usually shelved or displayed to potential readers as, and alongside, military history, despite the disregard historians have sometimes shown towards them on the grounds of subjectivity. Although military memoirs are autobiographical, they are not usually categorised alongside autobiographies and other forms of life-writing for sales purposes.13 They are experientially based accounts, but in our view, they should be understood as distinct from other experientially based writing about war by those either caught up in conflict as civilian...
