In six chapters, each with three or four sections, D. C. Gill presents a diverse collection of excerpts from letters mostly of soldiers and sailors, with some from family at home and journalists abroad. An independent scholar, Gill has her PhD in English. She quotes letters briefly, analyzes them at length. Quoted letters are not in chronologic or geographic order. For example Chapter 2, “An Opportunity for Change: War and Ambition” quotes 42 letters, each a brief paragraph, in 44 pages. Titles of this chapter’s five sections are: “The Subtext of Traumatic Self-Narrative,” “The Interdependence of Self and Group,” “Seduction by a Narrative Past,” “Expectations, Deconstructions, and Glamour,” and “Reconstruction.” The chapter i_ncludes letters from our Indian, Civil, Spanish, Mexican and Vietnam Wars, with quotes from Cotton Mather, Nietzsche, Jerome Bruner, and others. Letters from the Revolutionary and World Wars, Korea, Gulf, and Iraq appear in other chapters. The following example is from World War II: letters are identified by war era, not by place or date.

[The Island] smells of death and is barren and desolate….the men sit about listlessly. Nobody is in any sort of mood for kidding… I would rather not write anymore today, and I will not mention any more about Iwo Jima in any later letters because I am sick about my friends who died, and so please just tell me about things at home, & don’t mention the campaign anymore.

–Lt. T. Edwards to his parents. Ch. 4, “A Growing Estrangement.” (p. 117-118)

This is one of several letters illustrating why soldiers fail to communicate. “Nevertheless, a soldier’s urge to share his experiences helps him both process an on-going alien experience and convey his very individualistic reaction to it.” Gill begins the next section, “War gives its frontline participants a unique perspective denied to civilians.”  Official reports of war are couched in more optimistic terms than personal letters, she points out.

Gill’s style is verbose. She typically repeats words from a letter just quoted, as if the reader can’t keep track, even italicizing a phrase (adding “emphasis mine”), then restating the phrase in her discussion. Generalizations are frequent and often overwrought: “As communion benefits individuals by making them ‘larger,’ it also reveals the individual’s vulnerability in needing to lose himself or herself in a community.” (p. 5) Letters of different wars are often cited together to make a point, but that can obscure the huge differences in eras a century or two apart.

There are provocative statements: “The story of a nation operates much like an individual’s own life story. Not consciously created, a country’s story develops usually from select facts arranged into a pleasing story.” (p. 23) Gill can be eloquent, characteriziing America as “individualism paired with an almost religious sense of obligation to the community…. Into this dance between individual and nation begins the discussion of war: how it is birthed in stories, how it promises rewards for performance, and how its trauma can reorder an individual’s sense of identity. (p. 36)

Chapters are topical, e.g., Ch. 2 takes up eagerness for conflict and “enthusiasm for war’s dangers;”Ch. 5, spectatorship; and Ch. 7, war’s aftermath. One learns that women fought in the Civil War, often but not always disguised as men. Quotes from scholars about letters add some weight, sometimes without real substance, on topics like identity (Foucault) and flow (Czikszentmihalyi). 

Gill points out that we Americans count our losses, as in Pearl Harbor, but not the enemy’s, as in Hiroshima or Dresden. She mentions draft resistance and pacifism. PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) comes up: “A soldier’s dialogue of violence frequently reveals his internal sense of powerlessness that, in turn, feeds the potential for more aggression as he progressively feels more powerless.”  (p. 141)

Gill’s valuable bibliography of some 300 items includes Col. Dave Grossman’s On Killing (1996–not 2nd ed., 2009). She mentions his theme–that soldiers have to overcome the strong, normal inhibition against killing (Chs. 3 & 4). She also mentions Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam (1994) but not his Odysseus in America (2002), where he speaks of “moral injury” in combatants. Grossman and Shay have much to say about how war changes us, melding psychology, biology, history, and literature. Gill mauls Shay’s description of how narrative can heal veterans: she applies it to civilian relatives at home, changing past tense to present, with ugly ellipses. (p. 150) Shay, in his recent book, writes of moral injury to combatants, and ethical training and leadership. PTSD is now an epidemic among veterans, associated with suicide rates sometimes higher than battle deaths. While Gill is not current on this, she writes, “Through exposure to war, individuals may consciously retract their identity from communion with the other.” (p. 6)

 Trying to cover all possible ideas and interpretations, sometimes reluctant to take a stand, Gill comes up strong on witch hunts, the proxy “most seductive to civilians” and “the most shameful and divisive of all war activity.” (190). She points to the “persecutory whirlwind” in Puritan America, the shocking example of France in World War II, and the U.S. internment then of 120,000 Japanese Americans in violation of the Bill of Rights. California Governor Earl Warren justified it on racial grounds and apologized much later in his autobiography. “Elaine Scarry [The Body in Pain] writes that war is that which reveals the bare bones of a culture complete with inconsistencies. It unveils illusions that have passed for reality…. In parodying itself a culture can lose its contest for survival even as it wins a war.” (p. 193)

Despite its shortcomings, this book has current relevance and lasting value. To reflect on letters of people over several centuries offsets flickering news on television and the transience of “Twitter.”

 

© 2012 E. James Lieberman

 

E. James Lieberman, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Emeritus, George Washington University School of Medicine