- Band of Brothers Stephen E. Ambrose
- Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell
'I felt a tremendous shock, such as you get from an electric terminal;
with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shriveled
up to nothing.'
- The Sharp Edge
- Face of Battle
- John Keegan -describes of the life of the man on the front lines and is
both shocking and compelling. Covering the battles of Agincourt, Waterloo and
the Somme (they all took place within a short distance of each other), he
describes the similarities and differences of war thru the ages.
- Company Commander -
excellent account of the infantry advance thru Germany in 1944-5
- Away All Boats - the
Pacific war seen by the officers of the amphibious landing craft.
-
The Bloody Crucible of Courage:
Fighting Methods and Combat Experience of the Civil War
- Gunner's Glory - Johnnie M. Clark "From World War II to Vietnam - Untold Stories of Marine Machine
Gunners"
No one can deny the bravery and courage of the marines who tell their stories in this book, but it fails because of a lack of editing and context on the part of the author. Individual stories are presented, but unless you have an in depth knowledge of the battle [and I've read dozens of books on these wars], it's difficult to place it in perspective, and impossible to relate to the overall battle or war. In addition, most chapters start in the middle of a battle, then jump back to the gunner's childhood and training before returning to the opening scene. This is often used in novels and
movies, but here it's distracting and confusing. [A minor annoyance is the
repeated evangelical proclamations from the participants - was this a
requirement for being included in the book?] Rather than spending time with
this book, I'd suggest looking at some of the fantastic books that are listed
here -
Jarhead - Anthony Swofford -- A Gulf War marine's obscenity laden account
of his experiences as a sniper. The language is gross and
indelicate, but seems to capture the times.
… the problem with believing your
country's battle monuments and
deaths are more important than those of other nations is that the enemy
disappears, and it becomes as though the enemy never existed, that those
names of dead men proudly carved on granite monuments cause a forgetting
of the enemy, of the humans who died and fought in other cottons, and the
received understanding of war changes so that the heroes from one's own
country are no longer
believed to have fought against
a
national enemy but simply with other
heroes, and the war scar is no
longer
a scar, but a trophy. The warrior becomes
the hero, and the society
celebrates the death and destruction of
war, two things the warrior never
celebrates. The warrior .celebrates the fact of having survived,
not of killing Japs or Krauts or gooks or Russkies or ragheads. I
That large and complex emotional mess
called national victory holds no sway for the warrior. It is necessary to
remind civilians of
this fact, to make them hear the voice of
the warrior.
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