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When War Becomes Personal: Soldiers’ Accounts From the Civil War to Iraq is a collection from a variety of soldiers who served in a variety of wars but all of whom collectively can attest to the age-old truth that war is hell. There have been other similar anthologies published in the past, some of them directly aimed at teens, but I found When War Becomes Personal to be an outstanding entry. It is highly readable, offers multiple perspectives, deals with post-traumatic stress in a frank manner and also isn’t trying to be anything other than what it should. In other words, there are no overt lessons here or attempts to make war “literary.” While most of these authors have been published before and all are very good writers, that is not the point. Editor Donald Anderson just wants you read what they say and understand where they are coming from. After that, he lets you come to conclusions on your own.
Right off the bat I was surprised by an interview with poet and Vietnam veteran Joan Furey from the journal War, Literature and the Arts. Furey was a nurse for twelve months at the Seventy-first Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku during the height of the war. In her interview, she explains the unending nature of her post, and the negative effects “noncombat” medical personnel suffered after being exposed to trauma on a daily basis with no respite during their tours. From there Anderson presents several other Vietnam perspectives (my only complaint about the book would be that it is a bit heavy on Vietnam in comparison to other conflicts, particularly contemporary ones) including Joseph Cox’s “Notes from Ban Me Thuot” about missing death by a moment, John Wolfe’s harrowing tale of injury and recovery in “A Different Species of Time” and William Newmiller’s collection of memories from Vietnamese pilots trained in the U.S. who returned to fight for their country in the final days of the war. This in particular is the Vietnam we are least familiar with -- that of the actual Vietnamese. Finally, Wayne Karlin’s essay about returning the personal documents of a dead NVA soldier to his family is especially remarkable and the respect exhibited by everyone involved both inspiring and enormously sad.
Many other essays in the collection are equally stirring, from Isaac Clements’ Civil War memoir written in 1913 for his son and introduced here by his grandson -- after reading this you will wonder how any injured soldier returned home from that nightmare -- to Alfred Kern’s personal appeal to “Hang the Enola Gay” in the Smithsonian. But what stood out for me overall was the essay by B-2 bomber pilot Jason Armagost who wrote “Things to Pack for Baghdad” about serving as the lead aircraft in the first airstrikes on the city in the Second Gulf War. Framed around the 20,000 mile long flight to his target, Armagost writes about the books he brought to engage his mind as he takes turns flying, walking, eating and sleeping before the crucial 208 seconds over the city. The author is a thoughtful man and he has given his reading -- all much loved titles -- much consideration. “In the middle of the Atlantic,” he writes, “I won’t be interested in the cheap plot-twists of the latest bestseller. I’m in need of art -- recklessness, patience, wisdom, passion and largess. I rifle through the titles, grab five and return to the seat. We are over Ohio -- me, my books and the colonel.”
The books Armagost reads vary from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried to Rick Bass’s Winter: Notes From Montana. He reflects upon Admiral Jim Stockdale’s memoir and the seven and a half years he was held as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. He quotes Clausewitz’s On War and Ezra Pound, Socrates, Thucydides, Xenophon. Over the desert it is Antoine de Saint-Exupery he reaches for, and then later Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The combination of flight and war, literature and history that Armagost blends together is stunning; each paragraph is a different trip to some other time or place. The essay is incredibly personal but through the words of others he makes it that much more reachable for readers -- he brings what he saw and what he did on the flight down to earth so that we may understand it a little bit and also understand him. It’s a gorgeous piece that will hopefully be part of a much larger book some day and a perfect ending to an anthology that has raised the bar on war writing. High school students -- male and female -- should consider this collection a private history course and seek it out immediately.
"The narrative form that Spillebeen has chosen to use is quite unorthodox, but it works brilliantly. In the opening pages John is engaged in what we later learn is the Battle of Loos. He is quickly and horribly injured and as he lies helpless in the mud, hoping to be saved and uncertain of his physical condition, his mind takes him through random moments in his life. These flashbacks provide the author with an opportunity to explain how John came to be in battle and what it was like for him to be the son of a world famous author, (at a time when that was like being the son of a movie and rock star combined.) As he suffers great pain and loneliness in the time before his death, John does not reflect philosophically upon his life or his loss of it. Mostly he cries for his parents and his home, and wonders what has happened, what will happen, to him. It is one of the more realistic and emotional portrayals of a death that I have read and shows far better than any movie just what dying in a war is all about. It is worth noting that in the Battle of Loos the British army sent their men out to be little more than cannon fodder. They marched them into German guns, hoping they would overwhelm their defenses; they were wrong. The same thing happened in Gettysburg and Fredericksburg in the U.S. Civil War; the same thing happened in Gallipoli also in 1915. There are a hundred similar battles I could list here, give me time and it could be a thousand. And all of the soldiers are dead just like John Kipling, and all of them died just like he did. And it is never pretty, and it is never glorious. Death never is any of those things and if you think it will be different in battle then you are a dreamer; we are all dreamers."
Be sure to read the entire review - the book is amazing and I can't recommend it enough for teens or adults.
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When War Becomes Personal: Soldiers' Accounts from the Civil War to Iraq by Donald Anderson
Colleen Mondor, May 31, 2010
From my review at Bookslut:When War Becomes Personal: Soldiers’ Accounts From the Civil War to Iraq is a collection from a variety of soldiers who served in a variety of wars but all of whom collectively can attest to the age-old truth that war is hell. There have been other similar anthologies published in the past, some of them directly aimed at teens, but I found When War Becomes Personal to be an outstanding entry. It is highly readable, offers multiple perspectives, deals with post-traumatic stress in a frank manner and also isn’t trying to be anything other than what it should. In other words, there are no overt lessons here or attempts to make war “literary.” While most of these authors have been published before and all are very good writers, that is not the point. Editor Donald Anderson just wants you read what they say and understand where they are coming from. After that, he lets you come to conclusions on your own.
Right off the bat I was surprised by an interview with poet and Vietnam veteran Joan Furey from the journal War, Literature and the Arts. Furey was a nurse for twelve months at the Seventy-first Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku during the height of the war. In her interview, she explains the unending nature of her post, and the negative effects “noncombat” medical personnel suffered after being exposed to trauma on a daily basis with no respite during their tours. From there Anderson presents several other Vietnam perspectives (my only complaint about the book would be that it is a bit heavy on Vietnam in comparison to other conflicts, particularly contemporary ones) including Joseph Cox’s “Notes from Ban Me Thuot” about missing death by a moment, John Wolfe’s harrowing tale of injury and recovery in “A Different Species of Time” and William Newmiller’s collection of memories from Vietnamese pilots trained in the U.S. who returned to fight for their country in the final days of the war. This in particular is the Vietnam we are least familiar with -- that of the actual Vietnamese. Finally, Wayne Karlin’s essay about returning the personal documents of a dead NVA soldier to his family is especially remarkable and the respect exhibited by everyone involved both inspiring and enormously sad.
Many other essays in the collection are equally stirring, from Isaac Clements’ Civil War memoir written in 1913 for his son and introduced here by his grandson -- after reading this you will wonder how any injured soldier returned home from that nightmare -- to Alfred Kern’s personal appeal to “Hang the Enola Gay” in the Smithsonian. But what stood out for me overall was the essay by B-2 bomber pilot Jason Armagost who wrote “Things to Pack for Baghdad” about serving as the lead aircraft in the first airstrikes on the city in the Second Gulf War. Framed around the 20,000 mile long flight to his target, Armagost writes about the books he brought to engage his mind as he takes turns flying, walking, eating and sleeping before the crucial 208 seconds over the city. The author is a thoughtful man and he has given his reading -- all much loved titles -- much consideration. “In the middle of the Atlantic,” he writes, “I won’t be interested in the cheap plot-twists of the latest bestseller. I’m in need of art -- recklessness, patience, wisdom, passion and largess. I rifle through the titles, grab five and return to the seat. We are over Ohio -- me, my books and the colonel.”
The books Armagost reads vary from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried to Rick Bass’s Winter: Notes From Montana. He reflects upon Admiral Jim Stockdale’s memoir and the seven and a half years he was held as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. He quotes Clausewitz’s On War and Ezra Pound, Socrates, Thucydides, Xenophon. Over the desert it is Antoine de Saint-Exupery he reaches for, and then later Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The combination of flight and war, literature and history that Armagost blends together is stunning; each paragraph is a different trip to some other time or place. The essay is incredibly personal but through the words of others he makes it that much more reachable for readers -- he brings what he saw and what he did on the flight down to earth so that we may understand it a little bit and also understand him. It’s a gorgeous piece that will hopefully be part of a much larger book some day and a perfect ending to an anthology that has raised the bar on war writing. High school students -- male and female -- should consider this collection a private history course and seek it out immediately.
Kipling's Choice by Geert Spillebeen
Colleen Mondor, February 21, 2009
From my 2005 Bookslut review:"The narrative form that Spillebeen has chosen to use is quite unorthodox, but it works brilliantly. In the opening pages John is engaged in what we later learn is the Battle of Loos. He is quickly and horribly injured and as he lies helpless in the mud, hoping to be saved and uncertain of his physical condition, his mind takes him through random moments in his life. These flashbacks provide the author with an opportunity to explain how John came to be in battle and what it was like for him to be the son of a world famous author, (at a time when that was like being the son of a movie and rock star combined.) As he suffers great pain and loneliness in the time before his death, John does not reflect philosophically upon his life or his loss of it. Mostly he cries for his parents and his home, and wonders what has happened, what will happen, to him. It is one of the more realistic and emotional portrayals of a death that I have read and shows far better than any movie just what dying in a war is all about. It is worth noting that in the Battle of Loos the British army sent their men out to be little more than cannon fodder. They marched them into German guns, hoping they would overwhelm their defenses; they were wrong. The same thing happened in Gettysburg and Fredericksburg in the U.S. Civil War; the same thing happened in Gallipoli also in 1915. There are a hundred similar battles I could list here, give me time and it could be a thousand. And all of the soldiers are dead just like John Kipling, and all of them died just like he did. And it is never pretty, and it is never glorious. Death never is any of those things and if you think it will be different in battle then you are a dreamer; we are all dreamers."
Be sure to read the entire review - the book is amazing and I can't recommend it enough for teens or adults.
(8 of 12 readers found this comment helpful)