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American Soldiers AMERICAN SOLDIERS: Ground Combat in the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam by Peter S. Kindsvatter University Press of Kansas, 432 pp.; $34.95

At 7:30 in the morning on July 1, 1916, British men arise from trenches across an 18-mile front carved from French soil near the meandering Somme River. Their objectives, the series of German defenses on the other side of No man's Land, have been under bombardment for a week. Surely any German still alive over there will be too shell-shocked to put up resistance.

These soldiers from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Newfoundland, and Bermuda now making their way toward the dead and wounded enemy are well trained in the use of the bayonet. They don't know—they are now in the process of learning—that bayonets are nearly worthless for combat purposes in what will be called the Great War. Some 75 percent of wounds will be caused by artillery, as opposed to the .03 percent of wounds caused by bayonets. What these soldiers do know is that they are carrying heavy loads—between 55 and 70 pounds of materiel apiece: rations, an Enfield rifle, two gas helmets, 220 rounds of ammunition, two grenades, two empty sandbags, a spade, a pair of wire-cutters, a flare, a canteen, and other items.

What they are finding out as the seconds pass is that what they had been told, and what they believed, was false. Many Germans on the other side are alive; many German machine guns still work.

By noon, the British will have suffered nearly 60,000 casualties.

On my office wall hangs an enlarged photograph of some of these men just as they have emerged from their own trenches. One of them is already down; the fellow behind him appears to be looking to see if his comrade will get up. Following orders, he doesn't stop to lend assistance. He must keep moving.

I would give a lot to know what's happening in the minds of the men in that picture. They are dealing with the sort of cognitive dissonance many of America's troops have had to deal with since the war in Iraq was declared finished. The bombs keep blasting. The bullets keep flying. The hate, irrationality, and killing go on.

The literature on the mind and experience of men in combat is great and, on the whole, excellent. Among many other works, one might turn to John Keegan's The Face of Battle (1976), Eric Leed's No Man's Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (1979), Stephen Ambrose's D-Day (1994), Eric Bergerud's Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific (1996), and Gerald Linderman's The World Within War (1997). Denis Winter's Death's Men: Soldiers of the Great War (1978) is timeless. Martin Middlebrook's First Day of the Somme (1971) is among the finest books I've read.

The mind of the man in combat is, ultimately, uncapturable—partly because he has no mind: Veterans regularly say that, in a sense, one's brain shuts down during combat. One focuses only on specific tasks; there is no contemplation of big questions. But the warring mind's evasiveness makes it all the more alluring, and the books keep coming—e.g., Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing (1999); Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves (2001); and Peter Kindsvatter, American Soldiers: Ground Combat in the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam.

Kindsvatter served in the U.S. Army for 21 years, so he knows how to handle bureaucracy. Not surprisingly, then, his prose has a stilted, bureaucratic feel. And he quotes more than he should; sometimes American Soldiers reads like a compendium of what everyone but Kindsvatter has had to say about combat. But as an introduction to the warrior's experience, it works.

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June (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49