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It was hot that July morning as I crouched in the brush aside a main path in the woods. I wore an Army-surplus shirt with patches sloppily and inaccurately sewn on. A far-too-large helmet liner with twigs attached for camouflage sat precariously atop my head. A toy version of an M-1 rifle was at the ready. Soon a squad of my friends, clearly battle-tested crack German troopers, would appear on the path, and I would sink further into the thick brush awaiting my opportunity for glory.
"Here they come."
"Don't breathe!"
"Vroom! Tanka-tanka-tanka!" roared my weapon, now curiously transmogrified into a cross between a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) and a semi-machine gun, with sound effects perfected by hours of watching Combat on TV. Germans "died" dramatically in front of me, and I emerged triumphantly from my ambush, mouthing politically incorrect, Pattonesque epithets.
War was great fun for a young boy growing up in South Portland, Maine in the late 1950s and early 1960s. All shots hit home! (Though I recall that tremendous disputes erupted whenever new kids joined us from another neighborhood. It seems that there was no universal referees' guide for such war games, and some kids insisted that the skimpiest of foliage conferred bullet-proof status!) Death was theatrical and oh so temporary. And everyone was a hero—except for the obligatory younger brother of one of your friends, who insisted on playing with the big kids and promptly got killed—not unlike the occasional new character introduced in a Combat episode. New characters invariably got killed.
Of course, what we did in the woods back then bore almost no resemblance to the realities of combat. Fortunately, I did not come to learn about this disparity through direct experience. Like many historians—and not a few military historians—I have never been in combat. I must rely upon the accounts of those who have, and the work of scholars who have studied them. Two who have done just that are cultural historian Joanna Bourke of the University of London's Birkbeck College and the prominent classicist-turned-military historian Victor Davis Hanson.
Recently, both have written widely reviewed books on the experience of men in battle. In her controversial and frequently disturbing revisionist analysis of twentieth-century warfare, An Intimate History of Killing , Bourke seeks "to put killing back into military history." Meanwhile, in The Soul of Battle, Hanson has written a provocative essay on a distinctive democratic way of war. Both authors ask why men—ordinary men, not professional soldiers—fight and kill in battle. And while Bourke and Hanson alike dispel many romantic notions about the experience of men in battle, their conclusions could hardly be more different.
The received wisdom is that soldiers endure war. The literature on men in battle stresses the importance of training and male bonding, the apprehension of battle, the confusion and disorientation of battle ("the fog of war"), the ubiquity of fear, the psychological adjustment made in the face of death, the frequency of boredom punctuated by spasms of violence, the attempts to cope with the trauma of combat (superstition, drink, drugs, and religion), the close identification with one's buddies, and the long-term psychological after-effects of combat.
Based on her examination of the source material of British, American, and Australian involvement in both world wars and Vietnam, Joanna Bourke turns this conventional understanding of combat experience on its head. She claims that killing in battle is often associated with pleasure, even ecstasy, and that this reaction is by no means confined to a few psychopaths, but is common among ordinary soldiers. Whereas traditional military historians emphasize the fear, anxiety, and pain of combat, Bourke asserts that excitement, joy, and satisfaction are equally important emotions in such a setting, inspired by the combatants' "imagining that they had scored a good, clean 'kill.'"
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