Books discussed in this issue

WWII
The Bedford Boys: One American Town’s Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice
By Alex Kershaw
Da Capo Press, 2003
$14.95 paperback

Hiroshima
By John Hersey
Vintage Books, 1946
$6.50 paperback

KOREA
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
By David Halberstam
Hyperion, 2007
$31.95 hardcover

VIETNAM
Dispatches
By Michael Herr
Vintage International, 1968
$12.95 paperback

My Detachment
By Tracy Kidder
Random House, 2005
$9.95 paperback

IRAQ
Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles
By Anthony Swofford
Scribner, 2003
$15.00 paperback

From Homer’s epics to the newest best seller chronicling the lives of child soldiers in Sierra Leone; war has always called to storytellers. War stories are made of life and death, heroism and brutality, beauty and horror, and all the best and worst of humanity. And as the previous sentence demonstrates, they’re also a thicket of clichés waiting to ensnare the writer at every turn. It’s easy to write a bad war book.

These six writers stand out because they’ve written something more than battlefield pulp comprised of stock characters and a mounting death toll stitched together with barracks slang. They’ve written something that’s more than either history or a standard memoir. They understand that a good war story is more than a story: It’s the story: Not an accounting of advances and retreats or a ledger of death, but life magnified.

And so each writer evokes the historic sweep of war by writing of the mundane. Hiroshima, John Hersey’s groundbreaking narrative of Japanese civilians who survived the atom bomb, opens with Miss Tokisho Sasaki going about her business as a clerk at the East Asia Tinworks. Even David Halberstam — whose comprehensive Korean War history, The Coldest Winter, dedicates more than 100 pages to detailed psychological portraits of General Douglas McArthur and the other leaders who shaped this war — chose to start his highly anticipated book with a pair of American Lieutenants in Pyongyang wondering what their superiors have planned for them, and when the victory parade will begin.

Michael Herr, whose Dispatches chronicles his experience covering the Vietnam War for Esquire, tells of spending his days as a war correspondent with “grunts,” and disdains those journalists who coved the war from the bar at the Continental Hotel in Saigon. Tracy Kidder —whose Vietnam memoir, My Detachment, tell the story of his experience as a green Lieutenant struggling to find his place in the Army — pines for his childhood love more than he worries about the positions of the Vietcong.

Alex Kershaw’s The Bedford Boys details the experience of one small Virginia town that lost nineteen native sons on D-Day. Kershaw tells the story of the landing through a pair of twin brothers — one who died on Omaha Beach, and one who went home to mourn with the rest of Bedford. And Swofford tells the most personal of war stories in Jarhead — his own memories of playing football in the desert and waiting for “his” war, the first battle for Iraq, to begin.

Psychological research suggests that the human brain can’t comprehend the scope of mass casualty. We have a biological need for a single face, a single story to feel empathy. More than a hundred thousand people died when an atom bomb landed on Hiroshima in 1945, and twice as many were injured. Hersey chose six for the New Yorker pieces that ultimately became a classic of literary nonfiction.

Perhaps that’s why literary nonfiction lends itself to the stories of war. Intimate portraits are the only way to grasp the pathos behind the history. Each of Herr’s grunts, Hersey’s survivors and the women of Bedford, Virginia who tended their Victory Gardens and made parachute material in a local factory while they waited for their sons and brothers and husbands who never made it off Omaha Beach — make the war live.

Herr speaks of every man in Vietnam as the star of his own movie, frequently returning to the story analogy when he’s trying to explain how the reality of war departs from the romance.

“I went to cover the war, and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you’ve never heard it,” he writes.

Swofford tells of young Marines building a blood lust before they shipped out to Iraq by watching the very movies Vietnam movies that Herr’s reportage inspired – Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. He later imagines a scene from his own life as the “movie cliché” of an old warrior reliving his tour.

I suppose we all see war as a movie now — from the angle that can be borne. The angle that allows a soldier who is taking a human life for the first time, or a young reporter who is struggling to keep his cool amid the utter chaos of a siege, to psychologically remove himself from the situation, to rise above and watch the scene unfold as though he were eating popcorn in the front row of the theater.

But the experience of war, whether lived as a combatant or one who is watching and waiting at home, inevitably changes the way you see the world. I remember living in a military town during the first Iraq War, and being caught up by a palpable sense of importance. The very air felt different. My mother cried at the national anthem. My father began to hold the evening news as sacred. My school’s long hallways were festooned with yellow ribbons and hung with the names of classmates’ parents who were serving overseas — the names of those, it was implied, for whom we were to pray. I hung a little flag in my locker, and suddenly, everything mattered. We had all become characters in the movie.

That’s part of the appeal of war narrative. Everything that happens during wartime is imbued with significance. Kershaw writes of Elizabeth Teass, who quietly operated a telegram wire in Bedford every day for years, then one summer afternoon, bore the burden of being the first to know of her friends’ and neighbors’ deaths in France.

Herr tells of the soldiers who come to enjoy killing, and those who never recover from what they see; “Not even the most uncomplicated farmboy pfc can go through a war without finding some use for it,” he writes.

My Detachment, doesn’t have the influence of Herr’s masterpiece (most Americans under 40 have a image of Vietnam created almost entirely by Herr’s work), but Kidder eloquently describes the yearning of a young soldier to meet what he believes is his responsibility — to have a war experience that changes his life.

“I felt, increasingly, that everything I did was worse than pointless. And still, perversely, I wanted the war, with all else it had to do, to lend my life some meaning,” Kidder writes.

In life, it feels deeply wrong when your world comes upon a climax — the sort of experience novels are built on — then settles back down to everything as it was before. In nonfiction writing, it’s worse. Characters must grow and change and learn, or there’s no story in the war story.

The Vietnam War memoir is almost its own subgenre, as writers like Herr, Kidder, Tobias Wolfe (In Pharaoh’s Army) and Ron Kovic (Born on the Fourth of July) combine two archetypical plots — war and coming of age. Countless soldiers who are also writers need to write to make sense of their experience. They must get the war out before they can go on with their lives.

“A man fires a rifle for many years and he goes to war, and afterward he turns the rifle in at the armory and he believes he’s finished with the rifle. But no matter what else he does with his hands — love a woman, build a house, change his son’s diaper — his hands remember the rifle and the power the rifle proffered,” writes Swofford, whose first marriage couldn’t survive the aftermath of his war experience.

Correspondents too, feel the need to make sense of “their” war; “You were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did,” Herr writes of his Vietnam experience. Those, like Kershaw, who write from interview rather than experience, take on the burden of their subjects, writing the stories that beg to be told.

Kershaw, a war historian who is the most removed from his subject of any of these six writers, comes the closest to telling a classic hero story in The Bedford Boys. All the men are stoically brave and all the women waiting at home are faithful. They’re painted in the best possible light, all the shadows chased away; and that’s why they don’t seem as real the men in Swofford’s camp who are struggling with fear of combat and the loss of love. When Swofford’s characters do take heroic action, it matters more, because a reader can see himself in their insecurities, appreciating the significance of their bravery much more than the stiff-legged heroism of a perfect, but hollow, character following the “war movie” script.

I suspect that’s the real purpose of all war narrative, from the stories of mythic battles shared around a campfire to the newest bestseller. Writers who experience war feel responsible for recording the importance of regular people in highly irregular circumstances, for making their deaths and their sacrifices matter. Even those who hear these stories decades later and a generation removed, sense their power and feel an irresistible duty to pass them on.

“Once it’s out it won’t go back in,” Herr writes. “You can’t just blink it away or run the film backward out of consciousness.”

MISTY EDGECOMB, a former environmental reporter and June 2008 graduate of the literary nonfiction graduate program at the University of Oregon, just won a Fulbright to Korea.