Fighting Words: The Evolution of Modern War Literature By Jeet Heer Toro (April, 2004) revised and expanded War is a calamity for humanity in general, but some shrewd souls can turn it to their advantage. Aside from black marketers dealing in stolen goods and munitions manufacturers counting up their profits, perhaps the chief beneficiaries of war are young writers. When writers first start out on their literary career, their biggest problem is getting people to pay attention to them rather than having them ask, “What does this little punk know?” Yet if you’ve smelt the stench of battle, then you can speak with authority on an important subject that almost everyone is eager to hear about. From the time of Homer, war has been a great literary theme: The clash of men in arms providing a readymade dramatic conflict. If war is a great opportunity for writers, it also carries with it serious risks, not just of physical danger but also literary problems. In 1944, after graduating from Harvard, Norman Mailer joined the military, serving in the South Pacific. After time as a rifleman in the Philippines, he wrote his first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), immediately hailed by overly enthusiastic reviewers as the first major American novel of the Second World War. Mailer was well launched on a hurly-burly and well-publicized career that continues to this day. But, because Mailer’s first book was such a smash hit, he has lived in its shadow: even now he keeps dreaming of doing a “big book” that will be as equally popular. Like a jittery racehorse, Mailer leapt out of the gate too quickly, and so did the critics who praised his novel; the book hasn’t endured the way they’d predicted. Perhaps Mailer should have observed the “ten-year rule” that governs war literature. The best prose about war, both autobiographical and fictional, emerges at least a decade after the guns have gone quiet. The great books that shape our memory of the First World War (1914-1918) were all clustered around the year 1928: Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929), Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms (1929). Likewise, the 1960s were a rich decade for novels about the Second World War (1939-1945), including Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). In both Vietnam and America, writers are still coming to terms with the long conflict fought between their two nations. And most recently, former marine Anthony Swofford published Jarhead (2003), a memoir of the First Gulf War (1991) that won wide acclaim. In an age where we are constantly barraged with news -- when we can watch CNN reporters steady themselves while bombs go off in the background -- war literature seems like an old-fashioned and time-consuming craft. Like psychological therapy, good writing about war is an intermittent process, consuming years if not decades. It takes time to shape pain into meaningful narrative, the same way it takes time to recover from the shock and grief that results from the death of loved one. Yet the unique value of war literature is inextricable from its slowness. If we want to understand modern war literature, tracing the long journey from All Quiet on the Western Front to Jarhead, we have to ask why good war writing takes time. *** The writing surrounding the First World War was filled with grand rhetoric and flowery oratory. British Prime Minister Lloyd George promised “a land fit for heroes to live in,” while the American President Woodrow Wilson declaimed that it would be a “war to end all wars.” As the literary critic Paul Fussell has noted, journalists used a ornate, genteel vocabulary, inherited from medieval romances, to drape the squalor of trench warfare in decorous euphemism. Horses were almost always steads; soldiers were gallant, steadfast and staunch; the dead were the fallen. Thus in 1916 a reporter for the Daily Mirror praised the physical appearance of dead British soldiers who littered a battlefield, supposedly more attractive than their French counterparts: “Even as he lies on the field he looks more quietly faithful, more simply steadfast than others.” Simply by avoiding such language and speaking bluntly, Erich Maria Remarque’s autobiographical novel All Quiet on the Western Front shook up readers and became an international bestseller. Based on his experiences in the German army, Remarque described trench warfare in language as unvarnished as a stop sign. “A few minutes after they appear, shrapnel and high-explosives begin to drop on us,” the novel’s narrator Paul Baumer observes of a bombardment. “We lose eleven men in one day that way, and five of them stretcher bearers. Two are smashed so that Tjaden [a fellow soldier] remarks you could scrape them off the wall of the trench with a spoon and bury them in a mess-tin. Another has the lower part of his body and his legs torn off. Dead, his chest leans against the side of the trench, his face is lemon-yellow, in his beard still burns a cigarette. It glows until it dies out on his lips.” That cigarette smoldering in a dead man’s mouth is a characteristically sharp and focused image, unforgettable in its compact horror. (Remarque’s English language counterpart was Ernest Hemingway, who also achieved a tight-gripped vigor by purifying his prose of windy rhetoric and dead language.) Surprisingly, the most unsettling scene doesn’t take place in a battlefield but rather when Baumer returns home on leave. “I find I do not belong here any more, it is a foreign world,” Baumer reflects. “Some of these people ask questions, some ask no question, but one can see that the latter are proud of themselves for their silence; often they say with a wise air that these things cannot be talked about. They plume themselves on it.” Progressively in the novel Baumer becomes alienated from his homeland, his old teacher, and his family. Towards the end the only people he has any affinity with are fellow soldiers (including an enemy soldier he meets in no-man’s-land). Yet even this fellowship of the damned provides little comfort as Baumer’s comrades start falling off one by one. Bleakly the novel has only one logical conclusion: Bereft of everything, Baumer loses his life. This alienation from home is the core of much war literature, and partially explains why such books are so difficult to write. Those who witness bloodshed often despair of making their experiences understandable. “The real war will never get in the books,” Walt Whitman declared of the American Civil War. Like many soldiers from the First World War, Robert Graves fell into a thwarted silence because he felt those at home couldn’t conceive of the realities of trench warfare. “The funny thing was you went home on leave for six weeks, or six days, but the idea of being and staying home was awful because you were with people who didn’t understand what this was all about,” Graves told an interviewer. Not surprisingly, it took Graves years before he hit upon the exact tone, sardonic and jaunty, needed to describe his war years in his memoir Goodbye to All That. If Remarque’s took a relentlessly documentary approach, Graves found it easier to deal with the war by turning it into an endless vaudeville routine, with death, often, as the punchline. Consider this scene, where two soldiers report that they accidentally killed their sergeant major. The adjunct said: “Good heavens, how did that happen?” “It was an accident, Sir.” “What do you mean, you damn fools? Did you mistake him for a spy?” “No, Sir, we mistook him for our platoon sergeant.” The humour in this vignette is very English, depending as it does on a traditional irony of the master-servant relationship whereby members of the lower class are allowed to say outrageous things as long as they show the proper deference. Because Graves relentlessly shaped his material for comic effect, the accuracy of his autobiography has been questioned: Though Graves’s war writing, much like the tales of P.G. Wodehouse, is a fin slice of class irony, life rarely forms such perfect little stories. However, as a literary achievement, Goodbye to All That cannot be gainsaid. Certainly Grave’s use of gallows humour as a way of containing a horrible experience influenced subsequent novelists, notably Joseph Heller. In Heller’s Catch-22, a group of American bombardiers, led by the madcap Yossarian, keep trying to get out of military service during the Second World War. They’ve all flown scores of missions, but their promised relief from duty gets pushed further into the future as their vainglorious commander, Colonel Cathcart, keeps setting a higher bar for them to meet. The requisite twenty-five missions is upped to thirty, then forty, then fifty. (American soldiers in Iraq, whose tour of duty keeps getting extended, currently find themselves in a Yossarian situation). Finally Yossarian goes mad and decides the war could get on better without him. At one point Yossarian is berated by a psychiatrist named Major Sanderson, who criticizes the slacker soldier as a “frustrated, unhappy disillusioned, undisciplined, maladjusted young man!” The ensuing exchange is a classic of off-kilter dialogue: “Yes, sir,” Yossarian agreed carefully. “I guess you’re right.” “Of course I’m right. You’re immature. You’ve been unable to adjust to the idea of war.” “Yes, sir.” “You have a morbid aversion to dying. You probably resent the fact that you’re at war and might get your head blown off any second.” “I more than resent it, sir. I’m absolutely incensed.” “You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don’t like bigots, bullies, snobs, or hypocrites. Subconsciously there are many people you hate.” “Consciously, sir, consciously.” Modern war is often a heavily bureaucratic affair. For every one soldier, there are often ten support staff dealing with administrative matters. Heller’s great innovation was to realize that specialized jargon of the military was filled with comic potential. Heller used his sure parodic hand to mock this lingo, as in this form letter: “Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. and Mrs. Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father, or brother was killed, wounded or reported missing in action.” Heller’s 1960s contemporary, Kurt Vonnegut, also used humour to deal with war, but more as a distancing device. As a prisoner of war in Germany in 1945, Vonnegut witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, one of the largest massacres in human history. After the war, Vonnegut said he, “thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen.” In fact, the subject was perhaps too horrifying and large for a quickie book: Vonnegut struggled for more than two decades until he produced Slaughterhouse-Five, a very odd mixture of first person reporting, excerpts from academic history, grisly details (“I myself have seen the bodies of school girls who were boiled alive in a water tower by my own countrymen, who were proud of fighting pure evil at the time”), and science fiction. The sci-fi comes from the main character Billy Pilgrim, who was in Dresden but also travels in time and is kidnapped by space aliens, the Tralfamadorians, who put Pilgrim in a zoo and watch him mate with a movie star. From such a description, Slaughterhouse-Five might sound like a messy mishmash. Yet surprisingly, Vonnegut’s material coheres into a novel and moving image of war. Dresden was only one of the many mass slaughters of the Second World War. Whether taking individually or seen as a whole, these killings baffle the mind. Therefore, Vonnegut developed a deliberately fragmentary approach (heightened by Pilgrim’s habit of jaunting through time). The Tralfamadorians exist to provide a cosmic context, since on any human scale what Vonnegut saw was incomprehensible. The quasi-zen philosophy that these little green men enunciate is trite: “all time is all time.” Still they offer the possibility of viewing human inhumanity from a transcendent perspective. This small solace is better than nothing. With their use of goofball humour to delineate the absurdity of war, Heller and Vonnegut perhaps marked the final evolution of the war novel. While there have been other novelists of war since, the genre has become conservative, reverting to the realism of the early 20th century. Interestingly, most of the war novels that gain attention now tend to be historical fictions, attempts to imagine earlier wars, such as Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, dealing with the Civil War, and Pat Barker’s Regeneation trilogy, about the first world war. There seems to be a loss of faith in the novel’s ability to capture current reality, coupled with the increasing popularity of memoirs. Certainly the books about Vietnam that have caused the greatest stir have been non-fiction, notably Esquire war correspondent Michael Herr’s Dispatches (published in 1977 and based on his experiences in 1967 and after). Anthony Swafford, the author of Jarhead, is the latest in the long line of war writers, but his memoir is reflective of our times in its portrayal of war as a media-saturated experience. As Swofford notes, while waiting in Saudi Arabia in 1990 and 1991, he and his fellow “jarheads” (marines) stoked their blood lust with the classics of Vietnam War films. While most of these films are ostensibly anti-war, Swofford shrewdly observes that they have the effect to celebrate the “terrible and despicable beauty” of fighting. “Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man,” Swofford argues. “With film, you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his First Fuck.” The image of war films as porn is typical of Swofford’s handle on contemporary lingo. We all know soldiers swear, although only recently have writers been able to be honest about this fact. Hemingway had to use dashes in the place of curse words, Norman Mailer relied on “fug” (as in “fug you”) while Heller’s characters talk about wanting to “ficky-fick”. It is only with Vonnegut that full-dressed swearing enters. “Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker,” a character says in Slaughterhouse-Five, which the author footnotes with “the last word was still a novelty in the speech of white people in 1944.” Yet in the last few years, the vernacular language of insults and catcalls has clanged ever louder, thanks largely to the Jerry Springer Show, hip hop, and professional wrestling (all of which turn verbal abuse into an art form). “Trash talk” is the short hand description of this new cultural development. Swofford’s Jarhead is the perhaps the first war memoir written entirely in trash talk, and thus captures our moment like no other book. Aside from its linguistic novelty, Jarhead is very much of our times in his therapeutic obsessions. Swafford comes from a family of soldiers, and his decision to join the army grew out of a deeply domestic personal dynamics. “Before me, my father had gone to war and also my grandfather, and because of my unalterable genetic strain I was linked to the warrior line,” Swofford writes, in a typically sweeping sentence. “I understood that manhood had to do with war, and war with manhood, and to no longer be just a son, I needed someday to fight.” When Swofford joins the Marines, his father is told by the recruiter that “he will be a great killer.” Perhaps the most disturbing and jarring revelation in the book is that Swofford (or at least part of him) is disappointed when this promise is unfulfilled: Air bombardment did such a good job against the Iraqi army that Swofford’s skills as a lethal sharpshooter were never used. Speaking about himself in the third person, Swofford notes the inevitable corollary, which is that “you consider yourself less of a man for not having killed while at combat. There is a wreck in your head, part of the aftermath, and you must dismantle the wreck …. It took years for you to understand that the most complex and dangerous conflicts, the most harrowing operations, and the most deadly wars, occur in the head.” More than most war memoirs, Jarhead is an exercise in self-analysis. In describing his own dysfunctional family life and how it led him into the military, Swofford’s voice becomes self-pitying and almost weepy-willowy, in ways that clash with the books ceaseless flow of soldierly trash talk, such as, “I want to screw some whores and kill some Iraqi motherfuckers.” The change in tone is daring but not persuasive. After pages of swaggering and swearing, we’re not convinced that Swofford has a sensitive soul inside. There are flashes of great writing in Jarhead. Better than any other writer Swafford captures the bizarre desert surrealism of the Gulf War, with its backdrop of charred Iraqi soldiers and burning oilfields. Yet the book as a whole doesn’t quite work. Swofford still seems to be struggling with unprocessed memories, which need time to be sorted in his mind before they can be turned into writing. The fact that a decade after the Gulf War Swofford still hasn’t achieved sufficient distance from his war experience shows that some soldiers require even more time to achieve a separate peace with their past. *** Just as Swofford was disappointed by his failure to kill in the fist Gulf War, so many political leaders were frustrated by the unsatisfying resolution of that conflict, which left Saddam Hussein defeated but sill in power. For some members of the American elite, the first Gulf War produced an angst similar to coitus interruptus and, in many ways, the current war in Iraq is an attempt to finish a job that seemed to be left half-done. What is striking about the ongoing Iraqi conflict is how the Internet has given contemporary war writing an unprecedented immediacy. Last April, as the U.S. Army seized the Saddam Hussein International Airport just outside of Baghdad, readers all over the world would could follow the shifting impressions of foreign correspondent Robert Fisk while events were still unfolding. In his first post for the Independent of London, Fisk was puzzled by the fact that the airport seemed empty, despite television reports that the Americans had arrived. Shortly thereafter, Fisk offered a startling update, describing the rout of Saddam’s forces. (It seems that Fisk had just been at the wrong end of the airport while filing his first report, and was too hasty to hit “send” on his laptop.) The quick turnaround in Fisk’s Web postings is typical of war journalism these days. Aside from reporters like Fisk, amateur Web diarists (bloggers) bring us word of major events almost as soon as they happen. A few minutes with Google and we can get first-hand dispatches on the Russian clampdown in Checknya, the latest suicide bombing in Israel, or the Iraqi reaction to the capture of Saddam Hussein. Yet, even as we revel in our plugged-in smartness, we should heed the lessons of a century of war writing. If writers such as Remarque and Swofford are any guide, those who are experiencing the conflict in Iraq will be shifting through their memories for many years to come. Long after the hastily composed Internet postings are forgotten, we will have to turn to time-hardened writers to get at the deeper truths of war.