Why Do Military Memoirs Look Like They Do?

Abstract

In this chapter, we ask why military memoirs look like they do. We focus in this chapter on the book covers, and do so using a framework suggested by an existing literature on paratext. We examine in detail some of the key paratextual features of the covers of military memoirs, looking at the titles of books, the way in which an author’s name is presented, and the overall design of the cover, including the imagery and other features used. Given that the cover is so significant for the sales of a book, we then go on to consider how covers and their imagery comprise a visual economy, and in turn how this suggests a relationship to wider narratives about war through which it is given meaning in contemporary public cultural life.

The external appearances of military memoirs generate some interesting responses. Within a university context, in our experience as researchers who have spent a number of years studying them, we have encountered reactions to these books many, many times. Although (as we discussed in Chap. 2) there is a considerable accumulation of cross-disciplinary scholarship of and around military memoirs, they are not the standard type of publication usually visibly present in the spaces of an academic department. Leave a contemporary military memoir lying about on a desk in an office or a seminar room, and it is likely to elicit one of two immediate responses from passing colleagues or students, either curiosity or disdain. This suggests to us that the covers of these books are instantly recognisable, even to those who do not read them and may never want to. The genre is recognisable and so its cover conventions must work in very particular ways. Instantaneous responses are perceptual, sensory, triggered by the visual qualities of the memoir’s cover. In this chapter, we explore these visual qualities, framing the covers of these books as a paratextual element of the military memoir, a threshold to the book drawing the reader into the text.^{1 , 2}

These covers are important. Looking, over the years, at the piles of military memoirs which have accumulated on our desks and shelves, three ideas have circulated around and back to us, time and again. The first is that their covers can be, genuinely, enticing. They almost inevitably prompt the urge to pick the book up, open it, flick through the pages, and this is true not only for us as researchers of the genre, but also for our otherwise uninterested (or even ideologically repulsed) colleagues and students who have encountered them in our work spaces. The covers do a lot of work and, because inevitably the design and overall appearance of each tells its own story, when we talked with authors about their books, we included questions about the evolution of the book cover as part of our exploration of their social production.

The second idea, which is obvious in a way, is that the covers of military memoirs are crucial to the marketing and thus sales and readership of these books. What is less immediately obvious, and more complex, are the insights about the marketing practices around the genre which emerge from an examination of their covers. We can, for example, track trends over time, and fashions for specific features say much about the understanding that publishers have about the relationships between the genre and its readership.³ Trends emerge and fashions become outdated and the same text will be repackaged with a different, updated, cover. Unusual covers stand out, and then come to be emulated. Thus, covers are affected by their temporal positioning, and just as a memoir’s style and content may impact on future memoir production, so do memoirs’ covers. This can also happen retrospectively with the repackaging of previously published books into new editions; for example, see how Andy McNab’s 1993 Bravo Two Zero re-appeared in the mid-2000s with a new cover design bearing a twenty-first-century Iraq and Afghanistan war aesthetic.

The third idea which we have consistently returned to when considering the covers of individual military memoirs is that there is very often a tension between the cover and the content, between text and paratext. As we explained in Chap. 1, although on the basis of the text it is possible to work towards an indicative typology of contemporary military memoirs, classification schemas can break down when the cover is considered, and there is often a disconnect between cover and text. Although there are those where, for example, the cover indicates that it contains a story of action and adventure, or trauma and transcendence, and the text delivers that, there are plenty where this observation does not really ring true. The paratext may constitute a threshold, drawing a reader into the text, but the reader may find something rather different when they get there to that which might have been expected on the basis of an assessment of the cover. This has prompted us to consider the broader cultural (particularly visual cultural) frames of reference within which a cover might sit, tying military memoirs to other media formats (newspapers, video games, television dramas or films). And of course, any cultural frame of reference will, in its own way, be political. Media forms and styles are sites of representation, and representations and the practices through which they are constituted have a political economy. We have already suggested in Chaps. 1 and 4 that military memoirs can be vectors of militarisation, and one of the things we have long considered about military memoirs are the ways they connect to a wider set of media enterprises which articulate specific ideas about armed conflict and entertainment, and do so across different media formats (e.g. film, television drama or computer games).

There is considerably more to the covers of military memoirs, then, than a title, an author’s name, a set of images and a specific design aesthetic. In this chapter, we take forward these ideas about the reasons for the allure of particular covers, their paratextual features as marketing features and the tensions between memoirs as individual stories of experience and wider cultural narratives about war. Guided by Gérard Genette’s outline of the features of paratext and his strategy for examining them, we explore what he terms the ‘exterior presentation’ of memoirs and then discuss the issues arising from consideration of the various elements which figure prominently in military memoir covers, singly and through specific books. We look at the obvious things such as book title and imagery, but also at common paratextual elements that have a specificity to military memoirs, such as ways of presenting an author’s name, and the typography used in the cover design. Following our focus on the sociology of production, we look at the way in which the sensibilities of a whole book are indicated in one example. We then conclude by exploring the more abstract questions raised by covers concerning their relationship to processes of militarisation through their connection with the visual economy of what James Der Derian has termed the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment network (MIME-NET). But we start with a brief introduction to book covers as part of a book’s paratext.

Book Covers and Paratext

Books sold in hardback form usually have a jacket, a detachable paper cover wrapped around the bound book. A dust wrapper was used as standard in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a means of protecting a purchased un-bound book which the purchaser would then have bound, often to a style of their choosing. The sale of pre-bound books continued with the practice of wrapping a protective jacket around the bound book, but this jacket was rarely an object of interest. Jan Tschichold, the designer and typographer whose work included design of early Penguin paperbacks, is quoted as saying that in his opinion, ‘…as a rule, book jackets belong in the waste paper basket, like empty cigarette packages’.⁴ This disregard for jackets is now seen as curious, with bibliographers noting both their intrinsic bibliographic interest, as well as their status as historical documents and bearers of significant visual and textual messages.⁵ As Anthony Rota has observed, ‘it is astonishing that so much can be learned by looking at [book] jackets closely’.⁶ Jackets reflect tastes in design prevailing at the time of publication. They also reflect changing modes of publication, with the emergence of the individualised distinctive cover for soft-bound (paperback) books and the emerging dominance of the values of mass-market paperback publication in the publishing business including around cover design.⁷ It’s an obvious point, but it bears repeating that book covers, whether hardback jackets or softback covers, are designed to sustain a prospective reader’s attention sufficient to prompt the purchase of that book in a crowded marketplace.⁸ The cover (along with author and publisher reputation) is one of the top three factors prompting the selection of a book by a potential reader.⁹ The cover also needs to (usually) situate a book within a genre to enhance product recognition, particularly if the author’s name is not well known within that genre. As one of our authors commented, his publishers had insisted on the use of specific imagery because in their view

the majority of people who buy military books are not men – they’re women buying them for their husbands and boyfriends for Christmas or birthdays and therefore they don’t have a clue what they’re buying but they need to pick up something with an explosion, a gun.

Whether this view is widely held is unknown, but it emphasises the central position of the cover for marketing purposes by publishers. The ready availability of sophisticated desktop publishing and design software means that the tools for image manipulation for those without a dedicated in-house art and design department or the resources to contract out this task, are now available and usable for those working in and with small publishers and the self-publishing industry. It is notable that although there are differences in quality between the products emerging from major publishing corporations and from small presses, the tropes they use are largely consistent across the genre. And of course, a cover is something that all published books will have.

The concept of paratext is very helpful when exploring the issues around book covers. Expounded most clearly for the purposes of literature analysis by Genette, paratext is ‘the means by which a text makes a book of itself and proposes itself as such to its readers, and more generally to the public.’¹⁰ We have already introduced this idea, most recently in Chap. 4 in our discussion of book dedications. Paratext can be understood as a threshold, offering the possibility of entering or turning back for the reader. It is an undecided zone, a border or a fringe.

This fringe, in effect, always bearer of an authorial commentary either more or less legitimated by the author, constitutes, between the text and what lies outside it, a zone not just of transition but of transaction; the privileged site of a pragmatics and of a strategy, of an action on the public in the service, well or badly understood and accomplished, of a better reception of the text and a more pertinent reading – more pertinent, naturally, in the eyes of the author and his allies.¹¹

In the context of a book, the paratext is a set of practices and discourses which share a community of interest or convergence of effects around that book’s exterior presentation, its author’s name, its title and a number of other features that meet the reader’s eye. The form of paratext is defined by an intentionality and responsibility of the author and publisher and it changes continually over time if republished. Ultimately, there is always what Genette terms an ‘unequal sense of obligation’ associated with paratext, in that there is no obligation for a reader to engage with it all; some elements will be ignored by the reader and some elements will be intended only for some readers.

Genette proposes five questions that we can ask of a book’s paratext. The first of these is its positioning: where is it in relation to the text, and what is the location of its elements around the text? Second, what is its temporality, and what elements appear or disappear through the lifetime of the text (e.g. in subsequent editions)? Third, what is the substance of the paratext, how does it work or is intended to work? This concerns not only its textual elements but also its images, typography and other pieces of information that surround a book. In the context of military memoirs, as we explore below, specific pieces of information may include mention of military honours or author’s service and rank, for example. For any book’s paratext, this question about how it works will include consideration of other implicit aspects of context which define or modify a book’s meaning, such as broader public knowledge or generic contexts surrounding the author. The fourth question is about the pragmatics of who is attributed as author and to whom a book is addressed (a general public, a specific readership, critics, booksellers or those with a private or personal connection to an author or book?—see also Chap. 4). Fifth, what is the intention or purpose of the paratext? The paratext is subordinate to the text, devoted to getting it a readership and following Genette’s arguments about the need to see this question of function as an empirical one, in the rest of this chapter we explore in detail the covers of military memoirs in paratextual terms and with their authors’ explanations.

The Paratextual Features of the Covers of Military Memoirs

Title

The most obvious place to start is with a book’s title. This is the paratextual feature by which it becomes known. Given the idea that the paratext is a threshold over which the reader is invited, the reader has to have their interest piqued by the title, especially if the author does not have name recognition. There are patterns to the titles of military memoirs, of quite a simple kind. It is an obvious point, but the majority of titles will indicate the military content to come. There are also observations we can make about the small number of titles that escape this convention.

A title can be that of the operation that provides the focus for the narrative—Operation Barras, Operation Mayhem or Victor Two are all military code names.¹² It can describe the activity and technical speciality of the author that may provide the core context for the narrative; think of Special Forces Pilot, Sniper in Helmand or Combat Camera.¹³ The title can, relatedly, indicate the author’s role as a Falklands Commando or Squaddie, Diver or RAF Plumber.¹⁴ It can identify the collective in which the author operated, evident in Sabre Squadron, Fire Strike 7/9 or Team Tornado.¹⁵ Or it can indicate the equipment, weapon or vehicle through which the author encountered their war; examples include Sea Harrier Over the Falklands, Chinook, Ordeal by Exocet or Cloud Puncher.¹⁶ Of course, these are not mutually exclusive categories. They are recognisable to readers and raise their interest. So, there is something very straightforward about the titles of military memoirs; they indicate a story about something to do with armed conflict or military experience. As Jerry Pook recalled, his publisher had insisted on a title likely to maximise the number of hits following internet searches simply because ‘you know what the bloody book is about, write on the cover what’s in it.’ So it was titled RAF Harrier Ground Attack: Falklands.¹⁷ And most will use a subtitle if the main title is not explicit enough.

We see a great many titles using phrases in common English usage which may indicate something about violence; Tread Lightly into Danger, Dressed to Kill, Broken Lives, Hidden Wounds, Fighting for Peace, The Shooting Gallery, Killing Zone, Danger Close, Shoot to Kill or Baptism of Fire all do this.¹⁸ Or it may use an English phrase with established military associations, such as All the Queen’s Men or Sod That for a Game of Soldiers, Drop and Give Me Twenty or Swinging the Lamp.¹⁹ A title may be subtly and modestly suggestive about the author, as is the case with The Quiet Soldier or Barefoot Soldier or The Accidental Soldier or An Ordinary Soldier or Soldier Box.²⁰ The author may be a Weekend Warrior, An Officer and a Gentlewoman, An Unorthodox Soldier, Out in the Army or a member of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club.²¹ And various plays on words are also evident in, for example, the title of Warrior (man or tracked armoured infantry vehicle?) A Cold War (Bosnia in winter or the aftermath of the earlier conflict?) or A Soldier’s Song (the individual’s tale or an enduring common experience?).²² A small number use a phrase in common English usage with no military connotations, as with Forced Out, Walking Tall or No Picnic.²³ But usually, a military memoir needs a title suggestive, somehow, of its military association; even One Dog at a Time, suggestive of nothing more than dogs and with echoes of a Christian country and western song, is subtitled Saving the Strays of Afghanistan using a geographical reference to indicate the military context underpinning the story.²⁴

Publishers and authors may discuss titles collaboratively; Jake Scott talked of his desire to use Blood Clot as his title to reference the distinctive colour of the Parachute Regiment beret and the cohesion of the Paras, and his wanting the subtitle In Combat with Patrols Platoon 3 PARA Afghanistan 2006 because of his pride in his platoon, a small independent platoon doing reconnaissance work at the very start of British troop deployments in Helmand in that year.²⁵ The publisher was happy with this. Geoff Nordass had suggested using the nickname by which he’d been known in the Royal Marines—Bubbles—as part of his title but the publishers demurred, suggesting that it might make it sound like a children’s book. He had a variety of different titles in mind for Commando including ‘something to do with the waves and skimming the waves […] but that’s the one they wanted and they said it would sell the book so that’s what I went with’.²⁶

Author Name

A book has an author and an author has a name and the name of the author appears on the book’s cover. But in what form is the author’s name used? Some books bear just the author’s given and family names—there is nothing in the names David Morgan or Graham Colbeck that is suggestive of any military connection.²⁷ Given the ubiquity of nicknames in the UK armed forces, a knowing reader might sense an author’s military past when encountering Nigel ‘Spud’ Ely, ‘Big’ Phil Campion or Peter ‘Yorky’ Crossland.²⁸ The use of military rank on the front cover as part of the author’s name is interesting; a great many commissioned officers use it (General Sir Peter de la Billière, Major General Patrick Cordingley, Brigadier Ben Barry, Colonel Mark Cook, Group Captain Tom Eeles, Lieutenant Commander James Newton, Major Mark Hammond, Squadron Leader Pablo Mason, Captain Hugh MacManners) but not many senior NCOs (Sergeant Robert Lofthouse is an exception).²⁹ Lance-Corporal Vince Bramley is the only author we can find of Other Rank status below sergeant who identifies his rank alongside his name (and only on earlier editions of his book).³⁰ Others use post-nominals indicating military honours after their names, and there is an assumption in doing this that these letters will be meaningful to a potential readership. Examples include Johnson Beharry VC, Matt Croucher GC, Doug Beattie MC, Peter Ratcliffe DCM and Andy McNab DCM MM, all writing about the events that resulted in the award of their military honours.³¹ Some use their rank, name and post-nominal honours (Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Spicer OBE, Squadron Leader Jerry Pook MBE DFC, Lieutenant Commander James Newton DFC),³² but often by the second book they are dropped as the author’s name has become recognisable in its own right. Captain Kevin Ivison GM is identified as such on the cover of Red One even though he was no longer in the British Army at the time of publication, and his rank and medal (the George Medal) were included to add credibility to his status as author and thus to increase the commercial appeal of his book.³³ Jerry Pook recalled a discussion with his publisher, saying that although he had been reluctant to include his awards, his publisher had insisted: ‘we’re selling the book, we’re going to put them on.’ The permutations continue; some use rank, name and nickname (Sgt Paul ‘Bommer’ Grahame, Commander ‘Sharkey’ Ward), others use rank, name, nickname and military honours (Flt Lt Alex ‘Frenchie’ Duncan DFC; Major General Chip Chapman CB), medals are cited (Major Phil Ashby ‘awarded the Queen’s Gallantry Medal’) and we even have one in our collection who also includes the author’s RAF serial number (L4281028 George G Edwards BEM).³⁴ So there is plenty of variation.

The publishers who insisted to Jerry Pook and Kevin Ivison that they include citation of their military honours were correct; work on a specific subset of British Afghanistan memoirs found a statistical relationship (a positive correlation) between mention of a medal on a military memoir’s cover, and memoir sales.^{35 , 36} Medals are one way in which a memoir’s first-person narrator proclaims their authority to speak, provides them with ‘platform’ in publishing terms.³⁷ In paratextual terms, they constitute part of the transaction between the author and the reader, with the medal standing as a sign of authority. It also potentially taps into contemporary media articulations of the figure of the soldier as a hero, allaying all the anxieties that cohere around this figure with the presentation of demonstrable proof in the form of military honours, suggestive of the authenticity and veracity of the account.³⁸

Our final point about the naming of the author as part of a military memoir’s paratext concerns the use of pseudonyms—pen names used solely for publication purposes (and we have already noted this when discussing inclusions and exclusions in Chap. 5). The majority of military memoirs appear to use the author’s known name (it can be hard to tell, although Monty B, Johnny Gurkha and Mark Time are clearly pen names).³⁹ Other pseudonyms that we are aware of include Ed Macy, Andy McNab, Jake Scott, Pen Farthing, Steven Preece, Eddy Nugent, James Cartwright, Charlotte Maddison, Jackie George and Sarah Ford. Some pen names are explicitly signalled to the reader and some less so. Some of these authors are writing stories based on elite or Special Forces activity, and a cynical interpretation of the use of a pen name argues that it adds to the mystique of these individuals, their activities and their stories. The rationale used by authors and publishers is that the anonymity of the author is a necessary requirement for reasons of personal and unit safety and security, and for many this is undeniably true. But there are also quite practical reasons for authors choosing this route. Nigel Ely published the text of For Queen and Country originally as Terminal Velocity under the pen name Steve Devereux because he wanted to preserve his children’s anonymity, and was also working within the security industry where he felt that anonymity was appropriate at that point in time. Some author identities behind the pen names are openly known (such as Andy McNab, following a long and successful career in the public eye as an anonymised figure) or can be identified through others’ accounts (such as journalists’ accounts of a particular operation). Pen names are interesting in paratextual terms because the work they do around author identity is about building a relationship of trust between the author and the reader; the pen name therefore has to be a viable one in some way for the reader.

Cover Design: Images and Other Features

We have already suggested that the visual imagery on the covers of military memoirs has a specific allure and that they can be explored as an element of paratext. Indeed, very few in our collection have a plain cover devoid of imagery.⁴⁰ Images are important. It is of course repeating an over-used cliché to state that a book cannot be judged by its cover, but making a preliminary judgement from the imagery and design elements constituting the cover of a military memoir is exactly what is intended. A publisher’s purpose is to design a cover that persuades a potential reader to make a positive judgement regarding the book. Control over imagery and design rests with publishers (‘it’s their book and […] they are the ones paying the bills’). But these features of the paratext are also a subject of intense interest to authors (and we are the same with our interest in the cover of this and other books we’ve written) and much of this interest is around imagery. If we explore the dominant image categories that appear in contemporary military memoirs, we see people (military personnel, author, others); equipment, weapons and vehicles; and insignia or other unit or regimental identifiers. We also consider the typeface used for front cover text (title, author and other information) because of the way this works with imagery as part of the visuals of cover design. We explore this in detail because in the subsequent and concluding section of this chapter we want to suggest that this imagery is key to the visual economy through which military memoirs circulate, and there are wider ramifications of this.

Nothing says ‘military’ on the cover of a memoir like an image of a figure in a military uniform. It is the ultimate signifier, with the distinctive cut, colour and pattern of uniforms recognisable as military even if a weapon is not in evidence. The generic soldier figure makes repeated appearances on the covers of military memoirs. On the cover of Michael Asher’s Shoot to Kill, a memoir about his elite and Special Forces career with a focus on deployments in Northern Ireland, four uniformed and armed military figures are pictured with four men in civilian clothes.⁴¹ The civilian men face a battered concrete wall with their backs to the viewer and their hands stretched out at head height. One looks like he is being searched. Two of the four military men face the camera and they are wearing respirators. The anonymisation of these two suggests that this as a Special Forces memoir, the military figures generically uniformed as such (and the ‘From 2 PARA to the SAS’ strapline at the very top of the cover helps). A poster on the wall draws the eye, and words are visible: ‘Embassy’, ‘Sat. 29th Jan.’ ‘Dublin’s top show group’ and ‘Alice’. Two minutes with an internet search engine suggests the poster is an advertisement for a music venue in Belfast advertising a 1970s Irish rock band, in turn suggesting Northern Ireland during The Troubles. The image also potentially references the 1980 London Iranian embassy siege that brought anonymised respirator-wearing Special Air Service (SAS) personnel to public prominence. The anonymised Special Forces soldier appears also in studio-portrait style on Peter Mercer’s Not By Strength By Guile, a Special Boat Squadron (SBS) memoir.⁴² A further generic type is the despairing soldier; Theo Knell’s A Hell for Heroes shows a seated military figure facing the camera, helmet off and rifle by his side.⁴³ His posture is indicative of despair and he holds his head in his hands, an image reminiscent of some Vietnam War photographs. A similar figure is shown on the back cover of Bury’s Callsign Hades.⁴⁴ This imagery suggests the idea of the damaged or vulnerable hero. As with book title and author name, publishers have ultimate control over cover imagery and will suggest cover proposals for author perusal. Steven Preece’s Amongst the Marines is a good example of the use of a generic photograph of Royal Marines, captured on exercises by a professional photographer (the photo credit is to Reuters).⁴⁵ Preece was not the only author to mention that he rejected the cover initially proposed, which featured a generic soldier. The publisher’s first suggested cover had in fact shown a US Marine (rather than a British Royal Marine), a detail evident in the uniform and its distinctive disruptive pattern material (DPM, or camouflage) fabric. A particular fabric, while not recognised by a publisher, would likely be recognised in terms of its military specificity by many potential readers, an error that could potentially lead to a reader questioning the accuracy and even truthfulness of the author’s account.

Mark Ormrod’s Man Down is an interesting example to consider for the work that the cover image of a uniformed figure does.⁴⁶ The figure occupies the lower half of the cover, clearly male but otherwise non-identifiable, facing the viewer but looking off-centre and in front of a partial second figure to the right of the image. The figure is semi-silhouetted; as Ian Roderick reminds us, the use of a silhouette indicates something essential whilst simultaneously providing a blank space for the inscription of meaning by the viewer.⁴⁷ The figure holds a rifle, crouched as if poised to move, an active figure. On the back cover, a photograph of a helmeted figure in uniform shows a figure in a very similar pose; we may assume that this is the author. The figure in the photograph on the back cover holds a posture which suggests momentary stasis. The figure on the front cover indicates movement, dynamic activity and—we think tellingly—appears to be holding a posture compatible with that of the figure on the back cover, as if the latter had just moved into action. Whereas the back cover photograph shows nothing more than a landscape indicative of the irrigated settled farming areas of Helmand province in Afghanistan, the image on the front cover is in the centre of military action. An explosion behind the figure has raised a flash and a plume of dust and debris, mostly obscuring the rocky hills of the background, and the blue sky above these distant hills contrasts with the orange, rust and ochre hues of the central figure and his immediate surroundings. The figure on the front cover appears to be moving away from this, in attack. The word MAN, in block capitals is clear top and centre, and the block letters are in-filled with images of fire. It is a classic contemporary military memoir front cover, similar to those of other publications emanating from the British armed forces’ involvement in Afghanistan. What is interesting is the way that the imagery suggests nothing more than a story of active armed conflict. It is only on reading the memoir that its central theme of trauma and transcendence is revealed. For this is a story about a man seriously injured by an improvised explosive device, and his journey to recovery following the amputation of two legs and one arm. The cover imagery hints at this (there is an explosion in the background, and there is the title of course) but that suggestion is easily lost on a cursory viewing.

Photographs showing a human figure will also use photographs of a recognisable individual, usually the author. We can think of this as a paratextual strategy to give veracity to the story told in the text itself, by placing what is immediately evident as the author (or evident after a short perusal and a bit of thought—the pose of the figure in the photograph is usually indicative here) on the front cover. Stephen Paul Stewart’s The Accidental Soldier is a good example.⁴⁸ The top two-thirds of the front cover image shows a man we immediately assume to be the author, standing in front of structure of Hesco blocks and camouflage netting, wearing field uniform DPMs and webbing. The image locates the man in time and space; he wears ISAF and Afghanistan flag patches on the front of his webbing. He holds a sign made of cardboard and inscribed on this in marker pen are the words ‘Help me! Let’s all just go home and pretend this never happened’ in block letters. So the veracity of the author’s position as a soldier, in Afghanistan, writing about the war, is immediately obvious. The message on the cardboard sign is also interesting as a tie to the title, with this accidental soldier proclaiming a personal message at odds with the public-facing discourse saturating media portrayals of soldiers in Afghanistan during the war there, of quiet compliance with the stated mission. The author proclaims his independence from this, and his complex feelings about military participation, from the very start of the book via the cover.

How The Accidental Soldier engaged with the design team working for the publisher we do not know. What we do know, from our interviews, is that authors negotiate between two positions when discussing cover design, between their recognition of the limits of their input (‘I am not a designer’) and their sense of ownership and investment in their story, their book and thus their cover. Simon Bywater’s Forced Out, produced by a small self-publishing press, shows three images of himself in action, one in a desert location, one of him in his Royal Marines uniform and one in his police uniform.⁴⁹ These images have a blurred, slightly ghostly quality: ‘we kept it fuzzy because – I like that because that was a period of my life, really, when I was confused […] I wasn’t really sure what was happening, where I was going and why.’ The use of a personal photograph on a front cover, taken from an image captured in the field in action or down time, is used time and again. Jake Olafson’s Wearing the Green Beret, Kevin Murvin’s Weekend Warrior, Hugh McMannus’ Falklands Commando, Milos Stankovic’s Trusted Mole, Philip Williams’ Summer Soldier and Tony McNally’s Cloudpuncher all use this device.⁵⁰ Sarah Ford’s One Up bears a photograph with both generic and personal qualities; the image of a woman with the top half of her face and head obscured with an aviator’s helmet is a nod both to the anonymised Special Forces figure and to the personal.⁵¹ But with all of these, the paratextual work of the cover image is about establishing with the reader a sense of trust that the text within is a true story, experienced by the author with authority to tell that story.

Some identifiable faces on the covers of military memoirs are shown deliberately because of existing public recognition—or a need to cement public recognition of that individual. The majority of these individuals are public figures because of their military position or specific activities. Probably the most widely recognised of these is Simon Weston, a Welsh Guardsman badly burned in an explosion on the ship RFA Sir Galahad in June 1982 during the Falklands War. Weston’s subsequent journey of recovery was followed in a television documentary, and he has become a public figure as a commentator on armed forces issues. His face therefore has become well known through his appearances in news media and recognisable to the general population. His face was badly burned in the fire and explosions following the bombing of the Sir Galahad, and bears the scars of trauma and surgical reconstruction. The front covers of his three books (Going Back, Walking Tall and Moving On) all contain professional-quality photographs taken by portrait photographers, including Lord Snowdon.⁵² ‘I was only asked “Did I like it?”’ They are studio-quality portraits showing his head and shoulders, posed as photographers usually suggest with the body positioned slightly away from the viewer and the face direct to camera. There is nothing military to see on the cover of any of these dust jackets but the face, and its wounds, itself bears witness, and as such displays evidence of the author’s trauma and participation in conflict and hence authorise his account. The cover of Barefoot Soldier shows Johnson Beharry VC, a soldier with an infantry regiment who became a public face of the Iraq war following the award of a Victoria Cross for ‘two individual acts of great heroism by which he saved the lives of his comrades’ in 2004.⁵³ Beharry sustained a serious head injury under enemy fire, but still managed to drive a vehicle containing troops through enemy fire to safety. His book cover shows him in a posed studio-portrait style in full dress uniform with all his medals, the distinctive Victoria Cross visible in the centre bottom of the cover. There are also those—always senior career officers writing a career autobiography—who have figured in public life and whilst not necessarily immediately recognisable by name or face to the passing customer in a bookshop would certainly have recognition because of their senior military role and rank. General Sir Richard Dannatt explained that his cover photograph for Leading from the Front (in field uniform, in the company of uniformed troops) was taken with a group of junior NCOs at the Infantry Battle School, Brecon.⁵⁴ He liked the photograph because it communicated an authenticity and an idea of the author as a soldier’s soldier. Lt Col Tim Collins, General David Richards and General Sir Mike Jackson are all shown in a similar way, as visible, identifiable, individuals wearing their field uniforms.⁵⁵

There are also photographs of individuals which have, through their circulation prior to their publication on a military memoir cover, achieved a certain level of recognition as photographs. Although we hesitate to categorise such photos as iconic in the sense used by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites in their study of the politics of iconic imagery, their indexicality and subsequent circulation suggests something of their latent power as images of armed conflict or of military personnel.⁵⁶ The photographs of RAF Flight Lieutenants John Peters and John Nichol taken by their captors after their Tornado aircraft was shot down in Iraq during the 1990–91 Persian Gulf War were widely circulated through news media at the time following their broadcast on Iraqi TV, and in the war’s aftermath. In these two images, John Nichol stares to the camera, his face devoid of expression, and John Peters looks to the ground, his face bearing the marks of trauma, his posture indicative of fear and self-preservation. It would have been an obvious step for a cover designer to put these two images on the front of their account of the incident, Tornado Down.⁵⁷ The photograph of Vince Bramley after the battle on Mount Longdon (Falklands War) shows in grainy monochrome the close-up of a man’s face.⁵⁸ He wears a helmet and is unshaven. His eyes stare off into the distance, and example of the traumatised gaze or ‘thousand yard stare’ of the war veteran, a phrase originating in the US experience of the Second World War to describe the facial expression of a person showing trauma in the aftermath of battle. It is cropped; the original shows two men together. The image has circulated widely, with a copy of the original making it back to the war museum in San Carlos Bay in the Falklands. The photograph is clearly suggestive of battle trauma. Other iconic images include that of a group of Royal Marines from 42 Commando entering Stanley at the end of the Falklands War (Vaux’s March to the South Atlantic).⁵⁹ Tony McNally’s Watching Men Burn similarly uses a still from well-known media footage of the aftermath of the bombing of the ship RFA Sir Galahad showing soldiers looking at the conflagration from the shore of Fitzroy Cove.⁶⁰

Although nothing says ‘military’ quite like a uniformed figure, military vehicles, equipment or weaponry come close. A common strategy (particularly for smaller, specialist publishers) is to use an image of equipment on the front cover. This is important to authors. Chris Bain was insistent that the cover of Cold War, Hot Wings used an authentic photograph to communicate something of military aviation that showed ‘the spirit and the velocity and the beauty of fighter flying, ground attack […] shows the speed and beauty of low level fighter flying.’⁶¹ Joint Force Harrier features the Harrier fixed wing fighter jet on its cover.⁶² Beyond Endurance features HMS Endurance.⁶³ The Captain’s Steward naturally has an image of HMS Broadsword on its cover; other elements important to the author also feature but most important for him was the ship.⁶⁴ The accuracy of the image is also important; Jerry Pook, looking at the cover of Flying Freestyle, observed that ‘there’s only one thing wrong with it, the in-take blow-in doors are open, they should be shut, but only an expert would know that.’ This is because ‘it’s a picture of a Harrier on the ground, that is, because otherwise the intake doors wouldn’t be open.’ The aircraft in the image, a composite constructed from two photographs, also does not carry any squadron markings or number on the fin on the side of the aircraft. These highly specific details are important to authors; in speaking in part to military colleagues through their book (see Chap. 4), they are aware that the authenticity of their story is pre-figured by the paratextual work of the cover image. As noted above, if a cover image is inaccurate in some way, then what might this mean for the accuracy of the account that follows and the credibility of the account?

Our final point about the imagery used on the covers of military memoirs concerns the things communicated by small, particular details, insignia or cap badge, and thus the associations communicated (to those who can read these signs) about a unit or regiment. Again, these are paratextual elements, inviting the reader into the book. Regimental or other identities are signalled immediately by military headdress; the dark green beret of the Royal Marines, the maroon beret of the Parachute regiment, the beige beret of the SAS, the light blue beret worn by forces deployed under UN command or mandate, the hackle worn by Fusiliers within the British Army, a cap badge. The prime example of this is the use of the winged dagger insignia of the SAS which features prominently on memoirs by SAS operatives, and those working in association with them.⁶⁵ For a substantial period of time during the 1980s and 1990s, and until the Ministry of Defence (MoD) started to restrict the publication of Special Forces memoirs it was a popular standing joke that to join the SAS you needed two things—the ability to pass selection and a book contract. Publishers used Special Forces insignia because they knew that the allure of these units could translate directly into book sales, the regimental badge working as branding of the memoirs in ways recognised as highly valuable for sales.

Resisting the assertions of publishers about the most appropriate cover for a book can be hard for authors. An author recalled that he had had a conversation with his agent about this because of his desire to assert the specificity of his account of his tour of Afghanistan. He had said

I don’t want any helicopters, I don’t want any explosions and I don’t want any bullets and guns because they’ve all got helicopters, explosions, bullets and guns if you look at them all […] they’re all the same. Same desert jacket…

But agents and publishers assert that they know what sells, and as we have already cited above, the publisher’s view includes the idea that purchasers include those unfamiliar or uninterested in the genre or in military matters, who need to be able to easily identify a military book. For this reason, One Dog at a Time has a cover entirely devoid of military references and shows instead three puppies in front of a doorway; the market for the book is dog lovers, and nothing appeals to this group more than a rather cute picture of some rather cute puppies.⁶⁶ Thus, the cover accords with the conventions of the cover for an animal story, although the subtle inclusion of iconic bullet holes in the image might indicate to the savvy reader the military aspect of the memoir.

The covers for military memoirs published from 1980 which do not fit neatly into any of the above categories tell their own marketing stories and in paratextual terms again we see a threshold. In two such cases, just as the cover has a distinctiveness amongst memoirs, so does the text. The imagery on the cover of Héloïse Goodley’s An Officer and a Gentlewoman is of two contrasting pairs of footwear—a pair of high-heeled women’s shoes and a pair of battered black (Army) boots.⁶⁷ The book is primarily a training narrative, documenting Goodley’s experiences of Army officer training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. It is unusual within the genre because of the detail of the story of training, and because it is by a woman. Patrick Hennessey’s The Junior Officer’s Reading Club in its first (hardback) edition had a very distinctive cover and is also a very distinctive book.⁶⁸ The cover shows a pile of paperback books, the worn and battered spines of which face the viewer. On these are written the words of his memoir’s title running down the spines in the pile. Plastic toy soldiers, cluster at the base of the pile and patrol along the top. During production of the book, a number of different approaches were tried, which in some ways were either (for the author) ‘only one step removed from having an explosion or an Apache or whatever’ or (for the publisher) too journalistic and didn’t convey some of the more literary qualities of the book.⁶⁹ Penguin tasked a freelance designer to come up with some alternatives, and the result is a distinctive cover, another example of a paratextual threshold indicating something quite specific about the book. The paperback edition is different, echoing some tropes of more standard memoirs, using orange hues, a smaller pile of books, a pair of reflective aviator sunglasses perched on top, and in the lens of one of them images in silhouette (see above) of a human figure (a bare-headed soldier?), a machine gun and some tall flowers (poppies?). The paperback cover was designed specifically to appeal to a readership who may look for books in paperback format (e.g. for holiday reading) but who may not necessarily be regular readers of military memoirs.

This discussion of the cover design of a contemporary military memoir would not be complete without mention of the distinctive Stencil typeface or font. With its military connotations, it replicates a typographic design developed as a means of quickly and cheaply marking objects. The original technology of individual brass stencils which could lock together, cut in such a way as to prevent the painted lettering collapsing when the stencil was removed, is highly functional.⁷⁰ It is frequently used, almost to the point of cliché for military memoirs; see, for example, Peter ‘Yorky’ Crossland’s Victor Two, the spine of Craig Douglas’ Fire Mission: The Diary of a Firing Sergeant in Afghanistan or Matt Croucher’s Bullet Proof.⁷¹ As Eddy Nugent’s author noted, on the cover of The Map of Africa a stencil font was used for the strapline (THE JUNGLE! THE GERMANS! THE LUNACY!) as an appropriate form of parody on the cover of a book which in itself is a parody. ‘It was [a] military looking thing, like ammo box writing, which is one of the things that we used to chuckle about, all the military books are done with ammo box stencil writing.’

The work undertaken by the paratextual elements is also evident with very different connotations in the stencil-like font on the cover of Red One.⁷² The lettering emulates the fragmented elements of the standard stencil font, but the fragmentation breaks within the letter lie on varied planes to suggest something more accidentally and traumatically fractured and broken. The author liked the font design: ‘I think it’s about shattering and breaking and just that feeling of power … or something having happened to something… it’s a shattering.’ This is appropriate to a story of post-operational trauma and its effects. Although not stencilled, the slightly crude embossed-metal feel of the title of Simon Bywater’s Forced Out said something similar for the author: ‘it’s not perfect – my life wasn’t perfect.’ If we wanted to also press home a point about military memoir cover design, font and the gendered segmentation of the wider life-writing market (which we do elsewhere⁷³), we could look at very contrasting fonts such as that used on the original hardback cover of Home From War, a trauma and recovery narrative co-written by a husband and wife (and an additional credited co-writer).⁷⁴ The cover is white, contains an image of a bridal couple, and the title written in gold in a script-style font is suggestive of personal handwriting. We suggest that this book was marketed primarily at a female readership, because of its echoes of the covers of the ‘tragic life stories’ genre.

Our final point about the cover design of military memoirs concerns colour. We have already noted the common use of orange tones, suggestive simultaneously of sunsets and flames and, we suggest, uncertainty. Across the corpus of our memoir collection we see blue (sea and sky), green (the field), white (purity, peace or neutrality), black (power, death), beige (desert) and red (danger, blood), and these colours all do paratextual work. Fire (chaos, destruction) and mist (simultaneously suggestive of romance and concealment) also do paratextual work on some covers. As we noted at the outset, because of the paratextual functions of the book cover, the cover design is never accidental and is always purposeful. It is also notable that the designs for the covers of these books have much in common with the cover designs of contemporary military war fiction and related genres.

Paratext as a Whole

There is a range of other book features which also constitute their paratext and include end-papers, copyrights and publication details, photographs in plates or hypertexts embedded within the text of e-books, forewords by another writer or commentator, cover excerpts of text, front or back-cover endorsements from other authors with platform in the crowded field.⁷⁵ There is clearly much to be gleaned about their study for understanding why military memoirs look like they do. No element of a book cover design is exempt from consideration as part of the paratextual field. But the point of book cover design, of course, is that all these elements work together, do not unintentionally contradict each other and work in conjunction with other paratextual elements to encourage a prospective purchaser and reader to do so.

The front cover of Ed Macy’s Apache merits viewing as a whole to confirm this point.⁷⁶ The title is simple and direct (the book is about military experience with an Apache helicopter). The subtitle (‘The Man. The Machine. The Mission’) and sentence ‘The blazing true story from the heart of Afghanistan’ then follow, suggesting dangerous action (blazing), authenticity (true), at the centre of the action (heart) and time/place (Afghanistan). The author’s name is a pseudonym, chosen by the author in conjunction with the publisher cognisant that it would be unknown to the military memoir-buying public on publication and thus needed to start with a letter in the middle of the alphabet so that it would more often than not appear at mid-level, just below eye-level, on the shelves of key bookshops. The book’s title is in a larger typeface; Macy at the time of publication was unknown (and as an author becomes better known the relative font sizes of title and author name usually change). The cover imagery is dominated by a close-up image of a man’s head, his face mostly obscured by his aviator’s helmet. The cover designer wanted a photograph of the author on the cover, and Macy supplied a photo from his camera phone to try and gauge the type of image required. The designer liked the photograph—it was up-close and personal, and showed a man with a half-day’s beard growth which reflected a man in the middle of a 24-hour mission (a central narrative of the book is a particularly long and dangerous flying mission) and resisted the idea of a clean-cut aircraft pilot. Images of the aircraft and of military personnel are then used in the visor’s reflection, because

what he wanted to do was capture the mission and that’s why he decided – and its nothing to do with me at all – he decided he wanted […] to see the boys running in there, Apaches lifting, the iconic image of them flying, he wanted the whole mission to unfold in my eyes but using a visor as a reflection.

The reflection works at a number of metaphorical and practical levels, suggesting what the pilot is seeing, what they have seen, what they have thought about what they have seen, the understanding that this has given them through reflecting upon what they have seen and how they are a visual aid through which we as viewer/reader can see what they have seen. The dominant colour for the Apache spine and much of the cover was a bright, eye-catching green, because as the designer said, ‘you don’t want someone trying to find your book.’ It is the colour of the instrument display readings on the Apache helicopter, and chosen because ‘everything shines […] that green, even the light coming out of your lips is that green, […] ‘cause that’s the green that comes of out it.’ The silver foil cover was used, despite the expense this involved in overprinting with colour, to give the book an ‘aircraft metal feel’, so that ‘the word Apache could stick out in metal […] this is about a machine, a physical hard machine.’ Note that the metal in the book’s title is raw, dinted and knocked about to reflect the fact that ‘the aircraft gets dented and knocked but it still keeps coming back.’ It’s got huge scrape marks down the side of it as these aircraft have in reality, with a subliminal message, ‘you know, you can batter me but it’s still going to say what it says.’ The attention to detail in the design of the cover of Apache is close, because this was a key publication for HarperPress which invested significant resources in the book in the hope that it would be a bestseller, something that can never be guaranteed prior to publication. The cover carries an endorsement by Andy McNab (‘Puts you right in the cockpit… awesome’), a figure with known platform for his action-adventure military memoirs (and subsequent novels). McNab’s words constitute direct engagement with the reader through the use of the second person singular, with the reference to the cockpit reinforcing the book’s aviation theme (if you hadn’t already guessed this from the title). Ed Macy’s Apache sold very well, with over 100,000 copies within its first two years of publication.⁷⁷ In many respects, it is the ultimate military memoir cover.

Covers and Militarising the Reading Public

We have established that military memoirs look like they do because publishers are aware that book cover design can help book sales, and (to a lesser extent because they have less control over this although they are collaboratively involved) because authors care about how their books look. We want to conclude this chapter by considering the consequences of this for the genre. We suggested at the outset that a military memoir left lying around on a desk in a university context might elicit curiosity or disdain. This is because military memoirs are frequently seen to be associated with militarism and militarisation, in some way. We in turn consider military memoirs to be vectors of militarisation, but not in the crude causal way indicated by the comments of some of our academic interlocutors. Not least, we resist a model of militarisation as some kind of archaic practice of contagion inflicted on a civilian populace that would otherwise be differently organised and inherently more happy, healthy, secure and with greater freedom.⁷⁸ This model suggests that there is a near future within the contemporary liberal democracies of advanced capitalist economies, of societies divested of military organisations (and hence militarism), although we currently see no evidence at all for such a situation. Rather, we work with a model of militarisation as a process, multifaceted, socially constituted and directed, persuasive of elite and popular understanding and mobilised by members of society within that process.⁷⁹ In Chaps. 2 and 4, we have already suggested that military memoirs are emblematic of militarisation in society, and an examination of the covers of some of them bears that out. There is a visual economy at work across the genre in terms of their covers, their design and their imagery that draws upon, reflects and ‘promotes’ militarisation.⁸⁰ As Kurasawa notes, this has iconographic and institutional dimensions;

the symbolic structure of images affects how, where, and to what extent they circulate, while their circulation affects how producers aim to create a symbolic structure and viewers make sense of the latter.⁸¹

A visual economy will also be political, because as David Campbell argues

the idea of a visual economy makes clear that the visual field is both made possible by and productive of relations of power, and that these power relations bear at least some relationship to wider social and political structures which are themselves associated with transnational relations of exchange in which images are commodities. The consequence of this is that people in disparate places can be part of the same economy when they may not be part of the same culture.⁸²

A visual economy will be highly organised, around the organisation of production (the individuals and technologies that produce images), circulation (the transmission and publication of images and image objects—which would include books) and interpretation (the cultural resources and social systems through which images are interpreted and valued).⁸³ We want to suggest that the visual economy of military memoirs and their covers, evident in the tropes that we have explored in this chapter, are vectors of militarisation through the ways that their production, circulation and meaning-making operate as processes which ultimately enrol us all into an understanding and acceptance of military power as an appropriate solution to specific social problems (primarily, human security). As we have shown, covers work in various ways to convey this. Our point here is that there is a wider political context in which this visual economy of militarisation works.

In this respect, military memoirs can be seen as part of a wider network of ideas and organising systems for making sense of military phenomena. There is, within social and cultural studies, considerable recognition of the ways in which, for example, media companies use economic resources to promote through text and television particular ideological views, for example, around gender. At its most extreme, we could argue that military memoirs could be understood as part of the MIME-NET. The term and concept, developed by James Der Derian (and playing on an older idea of the military-industrial complex), works to explain contemporary warfare, the ‘virtuous war’ (Der Derian’s term) that is technologically sophisticated, representationally communicated, all-pervasive and ultimately rather bloodless (at least for the citizenry and military of the liberal democracies).⁸⁴ The MIME-NET is developed, sustained and reproduced by a network of media, industrial, military and entertainment interests whose work and interests overlap, cohere and coincide, less as a result of deliberate strategic intention, and more as a consequence of the functioning of contemporary political economy. Virtuous warfare, financialised and commercialised, can be entertainment. Military memoirs as a form of representation may prefigure (arguably by a couple of thousand years) the MIME-NET, but in their contemporary iteration they conform to its requirements and principles around the representation of warfare as controlled, technological, virtuous. That this may be the case is evident in their covers. Macy’s Apache bears a cover inviting us over a threshold into a text which is archetypical in its presentation of technologically sophisticated warfare. Furthermore, the networked relationships through which ideas and discourses about the possibility of virtuous war are produced and reproduced indicate directly the enrolment of the military memoir into contemporary commercial entertainment and its forms of capital accumulation. The contemporary visual economy of many book covers maps directly, in some cases, on to that of first-person shooter video games. For example, Firestrike 7/9, with its cover listing of body counts evocative of kill ratios, does this almost viscerally.⁸⁵ Perhaps the starkest reminder of the synergies between first-person shooter video games and this particular memoir has come when our students have immediately taken it to be one of the former rather than the latter when glancing at the cover. Other examples might be the print media tie-ins linking Dan Mills Sniper One and the mass-market tabloid Daily Mail newspaper,⁸⁶ or memoirist and military novelist Chris Ryan’s public connection with a range of media projects including first-person shooter video games, a television treatment of his book The One That Got Away and various other associations with television and film presentation and production. Andy McNab’s Bravo Two Zero has also been turned into a television film. In turn, McNab has endorsed Ed Macy (on the cover of Hellfire) as ‘a 21st century Top Gun’, alluding to the blockbuster film of that name, and also provided cover endorsement for Dan Mills. Paul Grahame’s co-author, Damien Lewis, in turn has a high profile as a journalist writing about contemporary war (including Special Forces missions) and has also published Special Forces fiction.⁸⁷ Lewis also co-authored Steve Heaney’s Operation Mayhem, which has cover endorsement by Bear Grylls, popular television adventurer, author and survivalist personality whose public persona includes presentation of a Special Forces military background. We could go on and on with the cultural connections discernible through military memoirs via their covers; the point is that a web of connections exists, between military memoirs, and between memoirs and other cultural forms which talk about armed conflict and military activities, factual and fictional. These connections are clear in military memoir marketing; see, for example, the endorsement on the front cover of Rob Maylor’s Sniper Elite, ‘A macho memoir of a Special Forces Badass’.⁸⁸ In stencil font, naturally.

Military memoir covers look like they do because they in turn are linked to a wider set of ideas, processes and practices through which warfare and military personnel are made sense of in the contemporary period. That frame of reference is of warfare as technologically sophisticated, bloodless, virtuous and a legitimate activity in moral terms despite its social and individual costs and consequences. The concept of the MIME-NET and its articulation of virtuous war is supported by our analysis of contemporary military memoirs, most clearly via an examination of their paratextual features. The commercial imperative of publication and for publishers requires the marketing of memoirs in accordance with ideas resonant within the MIME-NET, hence the pressure on authors for their book cover to conform to this, despite what the text might say and what they might think. We have noted how covers repeatedly escape their texts; the threshold may offer entry to a story that is at odds with that suggested by the cover. Paratexts exist in order to make the text desirable, to ensure its presence in the world, its reception and consumption. As Genette reminds us, paratext enables a text to become a book and, in the case of military memoirs discussed above, for that memoir to have a commercial life that reaches far beyond the person whose experiences of war brought it into book form in the first place.