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Bringing War to Book pp 43–64Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

What Do Military Memoirs Do?

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Abstract

In this chapter, we ask what it is that military memoirs do. We do this by thinking about the functions of the military memoir, looking at the range of ways in which these books are used in order to consider the purposes they can be seen to serve. We review how military memoirs have informed the writing of histories of armed conflicts, and their utility in exploring the socio-cultural understandings of war and the sociology of military personnel. We think about the public readership of military memoirs, and the difficulties of establishing clear ideas about that readership. We conclude this chapter by considering how these books might (or might not) be seen as vectors for militarisation, exploring how military memoirs exist as commercial products with a market and associated sales profiles, and sit within a set of cultural products and practices which make sense of war and military activities in particular ways. All through this chapter, we are concerned with the work that military memoirs do in arguments about armed conflict, the military activities that make it possible and the military personnel employed and deployed to those tasks.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Dwyer, P. (2016) Making sense of the muddle. In Dwyer, P. (Ed.) War Stories: The War Memoir in History and Literature. New York: Berghahn, pp. 1–26. See also Houghton, F. (2014) ‘To the Kwai and Back’: Myth, memory and memoirs of the ‘Death Railway’, 1942–1943. Journal of War and Culture Studies 7 (3): 223–235. Hewitson, M. (2010) ‘I witnesses’: Soldiers, selfhood and testimony in modern wars. German History 28 (3): 310–325.

  2. 2.

    Ashplant, T.G., Dawson, G. & Roper, M. (2000) The politics of war memory and commemoration: contexts, structures and dynamics. In T.G Ashplant, Dawson, G. and Roper, M. (Eds.) The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration. London: Routledge, pp. 3–85.

  3. 3.

    Winter, J. and Prost, A. (2005) The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  4. 4.

    Freedman, L. (2007) The Official History of the Falklands Campaign Vol. 2 (Revised and Updated) Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

  5. 5.

    Woodward, S. with Robinson, P. (1992) One Hundred Days: The Memoirs of the Falklands Battle Group Commander. London: Harper Collins. Compare and contrast the use of Woodward’s memoir in Arquilla J. and Rasmussen, M.M. (2001) The origins of the South Atlantic War. Journal of Latin American Studies 33, 739–775, De Santibañes, F.F. (2007) The effectiveness of military governments during war: the case of Argentina in the Malvinas. Armed Forces & Society 33 (4): 612–637, and Freedman, L. (2007) The Official History of the Falklands Campaign Vol. 2 (Revised and Updated) Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

  6. 6.

    King, A. (2010). Understanding the Helmand campaign. International Affairs, 82, 311–332. Tootal, S. (2009) Danger Close: Commanding 3 PARA in Afghanistan. London: John Murray.

  7. 7.

    De Waal, J. (2013) Depending on the Right People: British Political-Military Relations, 2001–2010. London: Chatham House. Dannatt, R. (2010) Leading from the Front: The Autobiography. London: Bantam Press.

  8. 8.

    Robison, B. (2004) Putting Bosnia in its Place: Critical geopolitics and the representation of Bosnia in the British Print Media. Geopolitics 9, 378–401; Simms, B. (2001). Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia. London: Allen Lane. Military memoirs referenced include Rose, M. (2008) Fighting for Peace: Bosnia 1994. London: Harvill Press. Stewart, B. (1993) Broken Lives: A Personal View of the Bosnian Conflict. London: Harper Collins.

  9. 9.

    Robinson, L. (2011) Soldiers’ stories of the Falklands War: Recomposing trauma in memoir. Contemporary British History 25 (4): 569–589. Robinson, L. (2012) Explanations of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Falklands memoirs: The fragmented self and the collective body. Journal of War and Culture Studies 5 (1): 91–104. Lukowiak, K. (1993) A Soldier’s Song: True Stories from the Falklands. London: Phoenix. Bramley, V. (1991) Excursion to Hell: Mount Longdon, A Universal Story of Battle. London: Pan.

  10. 10.

    Smith, R. T. and True, G. (2014) Warring identities: Identity conflict and the mental distress of American veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Society and Mental Health 4 (2): 147–161; Smith and True draw on memoirs to inform their account, specifically Kraft, H. (2007) Rule Number Two: Lessons I Learned in a Combat Hospital. New York: Little, Brown and Co., and Campbell, D. (2009) Joker One: A Marine Platoon’s Story of Courage, Leadership and Brotherhood. New York: Random House.

  11. 11.

    Roper, M. (2000) Re-remembering the Soldier Hero: The psychic and social construction of memory in personal narratives of the Great War. History Workshop Journal 50, pp. 181–204.

  12. 12.

    Green, M. (1980) Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. London: Routledge; Bristow, J. (1991) Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World. London: Harper Collins; Dawson, G. (1994) Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities. London: Routledge; Paris, M. (2000) Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000. London: Reaktion. See also Newsinger, J. (1994) The military memoir in British imperial culture: the case of Malaya. Race and Class 35 (3), 47–62, on memoirs of the more contemporary encounter of British forces in what is now Malaysia during the Malaya campaign of the 1950s.

  13. 13.

    Fussell, P. (1975) The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The books which Fussell prioritises are: Blunden, E. (1928/1956) Undertones of War. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Graves, R. (1929/1957) Good-bye to All That. London: Jonathan Cape; Sassoon, S. (1937) The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. London: Faber & Faber. See also Winter and Prost (2005) op. cit.

  14. 14.

    Paul Fussell was a military memoirist in his own right with his account of service with the US Army in the Second World War. Fussell, P. (1996) Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic. New York: Little, Brown and Co.

  15. 15.

    Houghton (2014), op. cit. Trott, V.A. (2013) Remembering war, resisting myth: Veteran autobiographies and the Great War in the twenty-first century. Journal of War and Culture Studies 6 (4): 328–342.

  16. 16.

    Wood, J. A. (2016) Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, p. 129.

  17. 17.

    Lewis, L.B. (1985) The Tainted War: Culture and Identity in Vietnam War Narratives. Westport CT: Greenwood Press.

  18. 18.

    Foster, K. (1997) To serve and protect: textualizing the Falklands conflict. Cultural Studies 11 (2), 235–252. Foster, K. (1999) Fighting Fictions: War, Narrative and National Identity. London: Pluto. Aulich, J. (1982) (Ed.) Framing the Falklands War: Nationhood, Culture and Identity. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Dodds, K. (1996) The 1982 Falklands War and a critical geopolitical eye: Steve Bell and the If… cartoons. Political Geography 17 (6–7): 571–592; Dodds, K. (1998) Enframing the Falklands: identity, landscape and the 1982 South Atlantic War. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16 (6): 733–756. Maltby, S. (2016) Remembering the Falklands War: Media, Memory and Identity. London: Palgrave.

  19. 19.

    Newsinger, J. (1997) Dangerous Men: The SAS and Popular Culture. London: Pluto, p. 38. The books are Andy McNab’s Bravo Two Zero and Chris Ryan’s The One that Got Away.

  20. 20.

    Brown, Keith and Lutz, Catherine (2007) Grunt lit: The participant observers of empire. American Ethnologist 34 (2): 322–328.

  21. 21.

    Woodward, R. and Jenkings, K. N. (2012) ‘This place isn’t worth the left boot of one of our boys’: Geopolitics, militarism and memoirs of the Afghanistan war. Political Geography 31: 495–508. Woodward, R. and Jenkings, K. N. (2011) Reconstructing the colonial present in British soldiers’ accounts of the Afghanistan conflict. In Kirsch, S. and Flint, C. (Eds.) Reconstructing Conflict: Integrating War and Post-War Geographies, London: Ashgate, 115–131.

  22. 22.

    Smith, T. (2016) The archive and the closet: Same-sex desire and GDR military service in Stefan Wolter’s autobiographical writing. Oxford German Studies 45 (2): 198–211.

  23. 23.

    Chouliaraki, L. (2016) Authoring the self: Media, voice and testimony in soldier’s memoirs. Media, War and Conflict 9 (1): 58–75.

  24. 24.

    Woodward, R. (1998) ‘It’s a Man’s Life!’: soldiers, masculinity and the countryside. Gender, Place and Culture 5 (3), 277–300; Woodward, R. (2003) Locating military masculinities: the role of space and place in the formation of gender identities in the Armed Forces. In Higate, P. (Ed.) Military Masculinities: Identity and the State, Westport: Praeger, 43–56; Woodward, R. (2006) Warrior heroes and little green men: soldiers, military training and the construction of rural masculinities. In Bell, M.M., Campbell, H. and Finney, M. (Eds.) Country Boys: Masculinity and Rural Life, Penn State University Press, 235–250; Higate, P. (2003) ‘Soft clerks’ and ‘hard civvies’: pluralizing military masculinities. In Higate, P. (Ed.) Military Masculinities: Identity and the State, Westport: Praeger, pp. 27–42. See also, for a perspective on the effect of Vietnam War representations, Boyle, B.M. (2009) Masculinity in Vietnam War Narratives: A Critical Study of Fiction, Films and Non-fiction Writings. NC: McFarland and Co. For an account of the intersection with ideas of race, in US Second World War narratives, see Koikari, M. (2010) ‘Japanese eyes, American heart’: Politics of race, nation and masculinity in Japanese American Veterans’ WWII Narratives. Men and Masculinities 12 (5): 547–564. For a perspective on the First World War informed by memoirs, see Meyer, J. (2009) Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain. London: Palgrave. Lunn, J. (2005) Male identity and martial codes of honor: A comparison of the war memoirs of Robert Graves, Ernst Jünger and Kande Kamara. Journal of Military History 69: 713–736.

  25. 25.

    Duncanson, C. (2009) Forces for Good? Narratives of Military Masculinity in Peacekeeping Operations, International Feminist Journal of Politics 11 (1), 63–80; Duncanson, C. (2011) Ethics, gender and forces for good: military masculinities in British soldiers’ accounts of Iraq and Afghanistan. In Bergman-Rosamond, A. and Phythian, M. (Eds.) War, Ethics and Justice: New Perspectives on a Post-9/11 World. London: Routledge, pp. 91–111. Cornish, H. and Duncanson, C. (2012) Feminist Perspectives on British COIN. In P. Dixon, (Ed) ‘Hearts and Minds’? British Counterinsurgency from Malaya to Iraq, Manchester: Manchester University Press; Duncanson, C. (2013) Forces for Good? Military Masculinities and Peacebuilding in Iraq and Afghanistan. Palgrave, London.

  26. 26.

    Khalili, L. (2010) Gendered practices of counterinsurgency. Review of International Studies 37: 1471–1491. Dyvik, S.L. (2017) Gendering Counterinsurgency: Performativity, Embodiment and Experience in the Afghan ‘Theatre of War’. London: Routledge.

  27. 27.

    King, A. (2009) The Special Air Service and the concentration of military power. Armed Forces & Society 35 (4): 646–666; Connelley, M. and Willcox, D. R. (2005) Are you tough enough? The impact of the special forces in British popular culture, 1939–2004. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 25 (1): 1–25.

  28. 28.

    Hynes, S. (1997) The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War. London: Pimlico; Bourke, J. (1999) An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare. London: Granta.

  29. 29.

    Robinson (2011 and 2012) op cit. Renwick, A. (1999) Hidden Wounds. London: Barbed Wire. Jenkings, K. N. and Woodward, R. (2015) Serving in troubled times: British military personnel’s memories and accounts of service in Northern Ireland. In Dawson, G., Dover, J. and Hopkins, S. (Eds.) The Northern Ireland Troubles in Britain: Impacts, Engagements, Legacies and Memories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 92–107.

  30. 30.

    Welland, J. (2015) Compassionate soldiering and comfort. In Åhäll, L. and Gregory, T. (Eds.) Emotions, Politics and War. London: Routledge, pp. 115–127. Parr, H. (2015) Representations of grief and the Falklands War. In Åhäll, L. and Gregory, T. (Eds.) Emotions, Politics and War. London: Routledge, pp. 154–166.

  31. 31.

    Maltby, S. (2016) Remembering the Falklands War: Media, Memory and Identity. London: Palgrave.

  32. 32.

    Kinzer Stewart, N. (1991) Mates & Muchachos: Unit Cohesion in the Falklands/Malvinas War. Washington: Brassey’s; King, A. (2013) The Combat Soldier: Infantry Tactics and Cohesion in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  33. 33.

    Baker, C. (2010a). ‘It’s not their job to soldier’: distinguishing civilian and military in soldiers’ and interpreters’ accounts of peacekeeping in 1990s Bosnia-Herzegovina. Journal of War and Culture Studies, 3, 137–150; Baker, C. (2010b). The care and feeding of linguists: the working environment of interpreters, translators and linguists during peacekeeping in Bosnia-Herzegovina. War & Society, 29, 154–175; Baker, C. (2011). Have you ever been in Bosnia? British military travellers in the Balkans since 1992. Journeys: the International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing, 12, 63–92. Brown, K. (2008) ‘All they understand is force’: Debating culture in Operation Iraqi Freedom. American Anthropologist 110 (4): 443–453.

  34. 34.

    Woodward, R. (2004) Military Geographies Oxford: Blackwell.

  35. 35.

    See for example Kevin McSorley’s work on sensing and smelling war.

  36. 36.

    Woodward, R. (2008). ‘Not for Queen and Country or any of that shit…’: Reflections on citizenship and military participation in contemporary British soldier narratives. In D. Cowen & E. Gilbert, (Eds.) War, Citizenship, Territory London: Routledge, pp. 363–384.

  37. 37.

    Woodward, R. and Jenkings, K.N. (2014) Soldier. In Adey, P., Bissell, D., Hannam, K., Merriman, P. and Sheller, M. (Eds) The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities. London: Routledge, pp. 358–366.

  38. 38.

    Woodward, R. and Jenkings, K.N. (2012) Soldiers’ bodies and the contemporary British military memoir. In K. McSorley, S. Maltby and G. Schaffer (Eds.) War and the Body: Militarisation, Practice and Experience, Routledge, London, pp. 152–164. Dyvik, S. L. (2016) Of bats and bodies: methods for reading and writing embodiment. Critical Military Studies 2 (1–2): 56–69. Dyvik, S. L. (2016) “Valhalla rising”: gender, embodiment and experience in military memoirs. Security Dialogue 47 (2): 133–150.

  39. 39.

    Wrigley-Field, E. (2008) How soldiers turn against the war. International Socialist Review 58, March–April (on-line edition).

  40. 40.

    Gee, D. (2008) Informed Choice? Armed Forces and Recruitment Practice in the UK. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

  41. 41.

    For example, see, on the socially-constructed nature of social science data, Cloke, P., Cooke, I., Crang, P., Goodwin, M., Painter, J. and Philo, C. (2004) Practising Human Geography. Beverley Hills: Sage.

  42. 42.

    Woodward, R. and Jenkings, K.N. (2016) The uses of military memoirs in military research. In Williams, A., Jenkings, K.N., Rech, M.F and Woodward, R (Eds.) The Routledge Companion to Military Research Methods London: Routledge, pp. 71–83.

  43. 43.

    Ibid.

  44. 44.

    King, A. (2013) The Combat Soldier: Infantry Tactics and Cohesion in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  45. 45.

    King, A. (2009) The Special Air Service and the Concentration of Military Power. Armed Forces & Society 35 (4): 646–666, p. 648.

  46. 46.

    Kirke, C. (2009) Red Coat, Green Machine: Continuity and Change in the British Army, 1700–2000. London: Continuum, pp. 219–222.

  47. 47.

    McGarry, R. and Keating, M. (2010) Auto/biography, personal testimony and epiphany moments: a case study in research-informed teaching. Enhancing Learning in the Social Sciences 3 (1), on-line publication at DOI: https://doi.org/10.11120/elss.2010.03010004. McGarry S. R. (2012) Developing a Victimological Imagination: an Auto/biographical Study of British Military Veterans. PhD thesis, University of Liverpool. Note also how former military personnel who have become academics have reflected on their own biographies as a way of informing sociological analysis: see Hockey, J. (1986) Squaddies: Portrait of a Subculture. Exeter: University of Exeter Press; Morgan, D. (1987) ‘It will make a man of you: notes on National Service, masculinity and autobiography.’ Studies in Sexual Politics 17, Manchester University. Higate, P. and Cameron, A. (2006) Reflexivity and researching the military. Armed Forces & Society 32 (2): 219–233; Jenkings, K. N. and Woodward, R. (2014) Blue-on-blue in military memory and memoir accounts. CuWaDis-European Group Workshop to advance the study of war, discourse and culture, ‘Accounting for Combat-Related Killings’, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, 21st–23rd July 2014; Hockey, J. (2015) The Aesthetic of Being in the Field: Participant Observation with Infantry. In Williams, A.J., Jenkings, K.N., Rech, M. and Woodward, R. (Eds) The Routledge Companion to Military Research Methods. London: Routledge, pp. 207–218. See also Kleinreesink, E. (2014) Researching ‘the most dangerous of all sources’: Egodocuments. In Soeters, J., Shields, P. M., & Rietjens, S. (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in Military Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 153–164—Kleinreesink is an academic, a member of the Dutch armed forces and also author of the memoir Officer in Afghanistan (2012), Amsterdam: Meulenhoff.

  48. 48.

    The Guardian 28th December 2014, using figures from Nielsen Bookscan.

  49. 49.

    Thompson, John B. (2010) Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Polity Press.

  50. 50.

    Sales data courtesy of Nielsen Bookscan. See also Kleinreesink, E., Jenkings, K.N. and Woodward, R. (2015) How (not) to sell a military memoir in Britain. Political and Military Sociology: An Annual Review Vol. 43, pp. 1–26. Transaction Publishers.

  51. 51.

    Jackson, M. (2007) Soldier: The Autobiography of General Sir Mike Jackson. London: Bantam Press. Dannatt, R. (2010) Leading from the Front: The Autobiography. London: Bantam Press.

  52. 52.

    Examples of accounts of trauma and recovery include Lawrence, J. and Lawrence, R. with Price, C. (1988) When the Fighting is Over: A Personal Story of the battle for Tumbledown Mountain and its Aftermath. London: Bloomsbury. Weston, S. (1989) Walking Tall: An Autobiography. London: Bloomsbury. Bywater, S. (2003) Forced Out. Lewes: The Book Guild.

  53. 53.

    Cowper-Coles, S. (2011) Cables from Kabul: the Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign. London: HarperPress, p. xxi.

  54. 54.

    Examples from the Dutch and British contexts respectively are: Groen, J. (2013) Junior Leadership in Afghanistan (2006–2010): Testimonies of a Mission. Netherlands. Kemp, R. and Hughes, C. (2009) Attack State Red. London: Michael Joseph. See also the ‘Forgotten Voices’ series of books, such as McManners, H. (2008) Forgotten Voices of the Falklands: The Real Story of the Falklands War. London: Ebury.

  55. 55.

    For a full exploration of the range of positions evident in autobiographical writing about armed conflict, see Vernon, A. (2005) No Genre’s Land: the problem of genre in war memoirs and military autobiographies. In Vernon, A. (Ed.) Arms and the Self: War, The Military and Autobiographical Writing. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1–40.

  56. 56.

    Couser, G.T. (2005). Genre matters. Life Writing, 2: 123–140, quote from pp. 129–130

  57. 57.

    Definitions follow Flusty, S, Dittmer, J., Gilbert, E., and Kuus M. (2008) Interventions in banal imperialism. Political Geography 27: 617–629; Woodward, R. (2005) From Military Geography to militarism’s geographies: disciplinary engagements with the geographies of militarism and military activities. Progress in Human Geography 29 (6), 718–740; Woodward, R. (2014) Military landscapes: agendas and approaches for future research. Progress in Human Geography 38 (1): 40–61. Woodward, R., Jenkings, K.N. and Williams, A.J. (2017) Militarisation, universities and the University Armed Service Units. Political Geography 60: 203–212.

  58. 58.

    Woodward, R. and Jenkings, K. N. (2012) Military memoirs, their covers, and the reproduction of public narratives of war. Journal of War and Culture Studies 5 (3), 349–369.

  59. 59.

    Genette, G. (1991) Introduction to the paratext, New Literary History 22, 261–272.

  60. 60.

    Der Derian, J. (2009) Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial Media-Entertainment Network. London: Routledge.

  61. 61.

    Davies, M. and Philpott, S. (2012) Militarization and popular culture. In K. Gouliamos and C. Kassimeris (Eds.) The Marketing of War in the Age of Neo-Militarism. New York: Routledge, pp. 42–59, following Der Derian (2009), op. cit.

  62. 62.

    See Coker, C. (2014) Men at War: What fiction tells us about conflict, from The Iliad to Catch-22. London: Hurst & Company,

  63. 63.

    Harari, N.Y. (2008) The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

  64. 64.

    Also note that the MIME-NET concept is very US-centric—there are other traditions at work in other contexts which show different things about the memoir in relation to militarism—for comparisons between UK, US, Canadian, Dutch and German approaches to military memoir-writing, see Kleinreesink, E. (2017) On Military Memoirs: A Quantitative Comparison of International Afghanistan War Autobiographies, 2001–2010. Leiden: Brill.

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    Rachel Woodward & K. Neil Jenkings

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Woodward, R., Jenkings, K.N. (2018). What Do Military Memoirs Do?. In: Bringing War to Book. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57010-9_2

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