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(More customer reviews)Why hasn't anyone reviewed this? It's been out for years and it's extraordinary.
Anyone who knows editor Paul Fussell's take on war will understand immediately what he's doing here. Fussell was looking for writers, usually soldiers themselves, who concentrate on war's terrible effect on the individual. He has little use for writers who fulfill society's need to find nobility in the battle, usually a must in other war-related books. If people resonate personal dignity, such as Pacific War veteran Eugene Sledge writing in these pages, it's well earned and comes after what can only be called utter torture.
Even though the only writings by Fussell himself here are the introductions to the sections of each war, the book has his sensibility all over it. And that means readers will be pretty much overwhelmed by the wealth of information and the power in which it is delivered.
There are so many amazing accounts, from the most sweeping to the most intimate. The stunning 20 or so pages of madness depicted in Seymour Hersh's account of the My Lai massacre is complemented by the heart wrenching few lines of a young British soldier in the trenches of World War I writing to his wife convinced he is about to die as he awaits orders to go "over the top."
Read this and you'll wonder why no one could foresee the inevitable pitfalls of invading Iraq.
There's only one disappointment, but it had to happen: None of Fussell's works is here. That's the problem with having one of the best writers on war edit a book on war, some of the greatest work is left out. But his stuff is out there. Read it all.
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Here are moments on the battlefields of this century captured in the words of writers who faced wars in their newest and most brutal permutation. Divided into the First World War, the Wars in Asia, and includes prose and poetry from litery figures such as Rupert Brooke, Ernest Hemingway, and James Jones.
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