Sometimes you have an idea and you work
on it and work on it and it just doesn't go where you planned. The
following is one of those. I'm posting it because of the time I
invested in it.
There are many kinds of war stories:
The philosophical explanations like The
Art of War by Sun Tzu and On
War by Carl von Clausewitz.
The
histories such as Livy's The War with Hannibal or
Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative which
are literature.
Biographies of
favorite generals like Caesar Napoleon, Patton and Sherman fill
library shelves.
“I was there and
this is what happened” histories written by those favorite generals
trying to explain away there miscalculations.
Fascinating
reads like Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant
and With the Old Breed: Peleliu and Okinawa by
Eugene Sledge. These are few and far between.
The one thing that
these types have in common is a rational effort to describe the facts
and acts of war. But I don't believe anyone would argue that war is
rational.
Apparently
it takes the guise of fiction to present its irrationality. The
Red Badge of Courage by Steven
Crane, All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque, and The Thin Red Line
by James Jones for example.
Prowling the
imagination, divorcing one's self from the rational portrayal of the
facts so you can better present the irrational behavior of men (and
now women) under terrible stress appears to better present the
actualities of facts.
General W.T. Sherman is quoted as saying, “I
tell you, war is hell!” It needs to be written that way.