Abstract
Our concluding chapter draws together the threads of the arguments spanning across the chapters to summarise how war is brought to book, both literally and figuratively. We then return to the ideas sketched out previously in this introductory chapter, about the specificities of time and place which result in the contemporary British military memoir being as it is. We discuss the relationships that exist between military memoirs as factual accounts, and the fictional representations of war and military activities that sit alongside military memoirs but are distinct from that genre. We conclude with observations about how we can recognise contemporary military memoirs not as vectors of militarisation but rather as moral documents about armed conflict and military activities.
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- 1.
See for example, Kleinreesink, E. (2017) On Military Memoirs: A Quantitative Comparison of International Afghanistan War Autobiographies, 2001–2010. Leiden: Brill. See also contributions to Dwyer, P. (2016) (Ed.) War Stories: The War Memoir in History and Literature. New York: Berghahn. For an example of a comparative exercise between memoirs of a civilian and a military commander in the Iraq war, see Malak, A. (2012) Between the artist and the General: War memories of Baghdad. Life Writing 9 (4): 407–420.
- 2.
Gardiner, I. (2012) The Yompers: With 45 Commando in the Falklands War. Barnsley: Pen & Sword. Napier, M. (2015) Tornado Over the Tigris: Recollections of a Fast Jet Pilot. Barnsley: Pen & Sword. Hutchings, R. (2008) Special Forces Pilot: A Flying Memoir of the Falklands War. Barnsley: Pen and Sword.
- 3.
Hill, C. (2014) Combat Camera: From Auntie Beeb to the Afghan Frontline. Richmond, Surrey: Alma Books. Tuxford, B. (2016) Contact! A Victor Tanker Captain’s Experiences in the RAF Before, During and After the Falklands Conflict. London: Grub Street.
- 4.
Riley, S. (no date) Simon’s A Poof’s Name. Amazon. Godwin, T. (no date) From Pit to Palace. Inverness: For the Right Reasons. Green, A. (no date) Frontline: A Soldier’s Story. Amazon. All three books are available via Amazon on a print-to-order basis from camera-ready copy supplied by the author.
- 5.
Douglas, C. (2013) Fire Mission: The Diary of a Firing Sergeant in Afghanistan Sept 07–Apr 08. GritFiction Ltd.
- 6.
We do not consider military blogs in any detail here, but for introductions to the issues around military blogging see: Wall, M. (2010) In the battle(field): The US military, blogging and the struggle for authority. Media, Culture and Society 32 (5): 863–872. Hellman, M. and Wagnsson, C. (2015) New media and the war in Afghanistan: The significance of blogging for the Swedish strategic Narrative. New Media & Society 17 (1): 6–23.
- 7.
Carew, T. (2000) Jihad! The Secret War in Afghanistan. Edinburgh: Mainstream. This book is widely recognised as a truly fake memoir, but is the only truly fake memoir that we know of.
- 8.
Our thanks to Paul Higate for alerting us to the practices around Walter Mitty hunting. In response to accusations that he was a Walter Mitty character, Steve Stone, author of a number of books written in the first person about British armed forces activities in Afghanistan and elsewhere, says quite explicitly on his Blog: ‘Just because a book is written in the 1st person it makes no assumption that the author is that person.’
- 9.
Coker, Christopher. (2014) Men at War. London: Hurst, p. 2.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
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, p. 9.
- 12.
One of the authors we interviewed, Simon Bywater, went on to write a novel Honourable Retribution (2006, Huntingdon: Charente Publishing) about the post-demobilisation experience of a former Royal Marine and PTSD. A number of other authors have also gone on to write military-themed novels having published their memoir.
- 13.
Parker, H. (2016) Anatomy of a Soldier. London: Faber and Faber. Marlantes, K. (2010) Matterhorn. London: Corvus.
- 14.
Kuus, M. (2008) Civic militarisation. In Flusty S, Dittmer J, Gilbert E, Kuus M (2008) Interventions in banal imperialism. Political Geography 27: 617–629, p. 625. Kuus, M. (2009) Cosmopolitan militarism: space of NATO expansion. Environment and Planning A: 41 (3): 545–562, p. 546.
- 15.
Lawler, S. (2008) Stories in the Social World, In M. Pickering (Ed.) Research Methods for Cultural Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 32–49.
- 16.
Bury, P. (2010) Callsign Hades. London: Simon and Schuster, p. xi.
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Woodward, R., Jenkings, K.N. (2018). Conclusion: Bringing War to Book. In: Bringing War to Book. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57010-9_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57010-9_9
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