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Rachel Woodward
K. Neil Jenkings
g
Brin ok in g
War to B o
Writing and Producing
the Military Memoir
Bringing War to Book
Rachel Woodward • K. Neil Jenkings
Bringing War
to Book
Writing and Producing the Military
Memoir
Rachel Woodward K. Neil Jenkings
Newcastle University Newcastle University
Newcastle, UK Newcastle, UK
Cover credit: Designed by Akihiro Nakayama. Photograph by Byron Kirk / Alamy Stock Photo
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
part of Springer Nature.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom
Acknowledgements
The research underpinning this book was funded by the Economic and
Social Research Council through the research grant The Social Production
of the Contemporary British Military Memoir, Rachel Woodward and
K. Neil Jenkings, grant reference RES-062-23-1493. Additional support
was provided by small grants from the School of Geography, Politics &
Sociology Research Committee, Newcastle University, UK.
Our thanks to colleagues in the Military War & Security research
group, Newcastle University and also those in the Power Space Politics
cluster, School of Geography, Politics & Sociology, for conversations over
many years about military issues and representation. We would also like
to thank Daniel Bos for his assistance with scanning book covers and
constructing our military memoirs database.
We would especially like to thank our interviewees who so generously
gave us their time and shared their ideas and experiences with us.
This book has benefitted immensely and immeasurably from conversa-
tions over the years with Victoria Basham, Daniel Bos, Patrick Bury,
Claire Duncanson, Paul Higate, John Hockey, Anthony King, Esmeralda
Kleinreesink, Nina Laurie, Ross McGarry, Matthew Rech, Alison
Williams and Trish Winter.
Rachel would like to thank her students at Newcastle University who,
over the years, have shared their thoughts about military memoirs. She
v
vi Acknowledgements
would also like to thank Joe, Ruth and Patrick Painter for their patient
tolerance of her reading habits.
Neil would like to thank Katherine Ann Nicholson and acknowledge
the support of family, friends and colleagues, both living and departed,
who collaborate and inspire in life as well as work.
Contents
Index 269
vii
Authors’ Note
ix
x Authors’ Note
It is this lack of consensus about a diverse genre which makes the mili-
tary memoir so fascinating as an object of study. In Bringing War to Book,
we are interested in the ways in which military memoirs report factual
and experiential information about military participation, and in this
book, we want to take them seriously, on their own terms, as they do so.
We are also interested in the ways in which the facts and experiences they
report are mediated in the telling, a process of communication which is
subject to interventions by a range of influences—not least those of the
author. In short, we are interested in the military memoir as the outcome
of social production and as a social artefact, and it is this which consti-
tutes the focus of Bringing War to Book.
What is a military memoir, though? The lack of consensus about this
diverse genre is hinted at in the existing literature on war-writing. Alex
Vernon talks of ‘no genre’s land’, noting the various genres at play within
personal war narratives, including not just memoir and autobiography,
but also poetry and various online media, and he also makes the point
about the significant presence of oral and visual formats in descriptions
of war.7 Samuel Hynes’ focus is more specific, seeing military memoirs
(he uses the term war narratives) as a sub-genre of autobiographies of
combat soldiers writing about a specific (war-time) period.8 Alternatively,
Kate McLoughlin takes ‘war writing’ to be that which is not identifiable
solely with ‘that written by a combatant, produced contemporaneously
or related to events on the battlefield’.9 In the broader perspective of the
twenty-first century, the terminology of armed conflict is increasingly
adopted to account for other forms of armed violence in addition to con-
ventional warfare.10 What becomes clear when defining a military mem-
oir is the extent to which the underlying context and purposes of analysis
shape the definition. Engaging directly with historians’ traditional disre-
gard for the memoir, Philip Dwyer in ‘making sense of the muddle’ opens
his edited collection on the literature of war by defining a war memoir as
a story told from an entirely different perspective to that of the historian
or the senior military autobiographer, as at its most basic ‘that of the
common soldier or civilian who has little or no control over the events
that they are caught up in’.11 McLoughlin and others, writing from a lit-
erary studies perspective, have a focus on the text of the memoir in rela-
tion to other textual materials. The disciplinary context of Bringing War
4 R. Woodward and K. N. Jenkings
to Book is neither historical nor literary studies, but rather is social scien-
tific. We came to be interested in military memoirs as a source of socio-
logical data for understanding military experience in the round, and from
that we came to be interested in how that data source—the published
first-person narratives of individuals engaged in military activities—
comes into being. So our interest in accounts of military personnel in
armed conflict—how war is brought to book, one could say—focuses on
the nature and content of factual accounts. For example, our interest is in
personal accounts such as Chantelle Taylor’s in Bad Company of her
involvement with wounded personnel from both sides of the Afghanistan
conflict, and what this tells us in turn about how stories such as hers enter
the public domain, rather than the fictional experiences of literary cre-
ations such as Tolstoy’s Russian army officer Prince Andrei and his distri-
bution of gold to his soldiers rather than attending to their wounds,
whatever the undoubted literary, philosophical and aesthetic qualities of
Tolstoy’s fiction and what this tells us about war and peace.12
In this chapter, we define the sole form of text with which Bringing
War to Book is concerned, the contemporary military memoir. We start
by introducing the genre, and its twin goals of telling stories rooted in
factual information about military participation, and presenting narra-
tives which prioritise the individual, lived experience of that participation
in texts which claim authenticity on the basis of the witnessing of events
recounted. We continue this introduction by discussing the diversity of
the genre and exploring the range of types of military memoir that our
immersion in the genre has revealed. We then outline three ideas which
frame the social production of the military memoir and which thread
through this book. These are the extent and limits of communicative pos-
sibility in these books, the role of paratext in these text-based accounts,
and the way what we term ‘military literacy’ functions to help explain the
journey so many individuals make, from military operative to published
author. We conclude with an overview of the subsequent chapters, each
framed by a specific question about military memoirs. In answering these
questions, we show how accounts of war and military life in preparation
for it are both figuratively and literally brought to book.
What Is a Military Memoir? 5
Military memoirs can hence be about much more than direct combat. It
is also certainly the case that many of these first-person accounts may deal
hastily with the author’s background to establish an idea of his or her life
prior to the events around which the narrative focuses; examples include
Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That or David Hart Dyke’s Four Weeks in
May, which both provide a modest sufficiency of information about the
author’s backstory to explain their arrival in the theatre of war (respec-
tively, the First World War and the Falklands War).15 But equally, albeit in
smaller numbers, the genre includes memoirs of military training (such as
Trevor Edwards’ Average: A Training Diary), of selection (like Adam
Ballinger’s The Quiet Soldier) and of the day-to-day activities that fill a
military operative’s time when not on operations (such as Tony Groom’s
Diver).16 Military memoirs are therefore not just about direct combat and
the experiences of combat personnel.
As we have noted, military memoirs are, first and foremost, non-fiction
books. Military memoirs report factual information, and although this
facticity may be disputed in terms of its accuracy or validity (and we
return to this theme a number of times in this book), a defining feature
of the genre is the basing of the narrative on observed events or facts,
subsequently reported. The factual information they provide is about
military activities in particular times and places—what happened, when,
where, with whom, using which strategies, tactics and weapons. The ori-
gins of the genre, in Noah Yuval Harari’s view, lie with the accounts writ-
ten by medieval European knights, produced for the purposes of listing
their achievements and experiences, in contemporary language a form of
CV developed for the attention of a prospective employer.17 Philip Dwyer
sees the emergence of military autobiographical writing as a distinctive
form coinciding with the rise of the centralising state, written by elites in
the service of their respective monarchies.18 The military memoir’s subse-
quent democratisation beyond the accounts of the political and military
elite is a feature from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. That this
democratic textual form emerged as and when it did was a reflection of
cultural, political and philosophical developments and shifts, including
sensibilities around the self and sentiment.19 Neil Ramsey notes the rise
of the military memoir in the Romantic period, deriving from the
Napoleonic wars, with private soldiers’ memoirs representing one of the
What Is a Military Memoir? 7
(and indeed the First World War) collectively set out not just the range of
experiences of participation in this global conflagration but also the
correctives that participants have sought to make to other histories (often
state-sanctioned) which also emerged in this period.30
The Vietnam War was also highly influential in the evolution of the
genre; distinctive characteristics of memoirs emerging from this war
include their quantity (reflecting mass participation of enlisted men), and
a heightened sensibility about the validity of reporting war’s traumatic
effects (reflecting cultural endorsement of the idea of war damage, in turn
a factor in the formal identification of post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD) as a diagnosis five years after the end of the war).31 The Vietnam
War memoirs also frequently use a format in which the author’s war expe-
rience is contextualised with reference to life before the war, and the life
lived after.32 This structural device is used to testify to the transformative
nature of war; Karl Marlantes in What It is Like to Go to War uses this
device to reflect back on a period of over 30 years of living with the
Vietnam War’s aftermath.33 As David Kieran observes, there is a com-
monality across much of the writing that emanated from that conflict in
terms of tropes of remembrance, memorialisation and critique of US for-
eign policy.34 He goes on to observe the ruptures evident between US
personnel writing about Vietnam, and those writing their accounts of
their Iraq and Afghanistan experience, which fall short of critique and are
more celebratory of the military operative.35 Language can also change in
terms of the discursive shifts and tropes used, with Lilie Chouliaraki, for
example, observing the emergence of what she terms ‘meta-irony’ in
contemporary US military blogs, in comparison with the existential irony
of First World War writing and the historical irony of the Second.36
In Bringing War to Book, though, we are concerned less with the inheri-
tance of the genre into the present (although we discuss this through the
perspective of authors) but with the writing and production of the con-
temporary military memoir as a genre in the present. Our period of focus
stretches from 1980 to our time of writing (ending in 2017; later in this
chapter, we explain the rationale for this starting point). We chose delib-
erately to focus on memoirs published about participation with British
armed forces, both to limit the field and because, we would argue, the
irreducible connection between an armed force and its nation state brings
What Is a Military Memoir? 9
military memoir is the assertion by the author of having been there and
the assertion of the authority of authentic experience as a means of claim-
ing the validity and accuracy of the factual information a memoir
contains.
The other principal feature is that contemporary military memoirs are
experientially based reflections on the activities, events, background and
context they describe: how the author came to enlist; his or her transition
from civilian to soldier, sailor or aircrew; how it felt, physically and emo-
tionally, to engage in a specific military operation; and how armed
conflict’s affectual and embodied legacies continued to shape that partici-
pant’s life in the aftermath. Doug Beattie’s Taskforce Helmand
(Afghanistan), Harry Benson’s Scram (Falklands War) and Monty B’s A
Sniper’s Conflict (Iraq and Afghanistan) all have this essentially personal,
experiential quality.43 At their best, military memoirs transform descrip-
tions of the personal experience of war into explanations of the meaning
of war. They are, as Harari defines them, revelatory texts, revealing what
war is and what war does.44 Patrick Bury makes exactly this point in his
prologue to Callsign Hades, his account of junior officer command in
Afghanistan in 2008, when he says that
this is simply a story of war and men. About what men do in war and what
war does to men.45
part of what some have termed a more general memory boom (which has
not been solely about war, but in which war figures strongly).47 The steady
expansion of the social, political and cultural significance of recognising,
understanding and valorising ordinary lives is, too, a feature of the expan-
sion of life-writing into the twenty-first century (again, war features here
with the democratisation of writing about war experience beyond those
with status, profile or resources).48 Market expansion, combined with
higher literacy rates and the ready availability of life-writing texts in differ-
ent formats, is also a feature, and military memoirs are significant with
their growth in e-reader format, frequently produced without the inter-
ventions of a publishing house and readily available online at low cost.49