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Monday, September 24, 2012

War Stories

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.