Scott Beauchamp Would Blush

“If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie,” Tim O’Brien famously wrote in The Things They Carried. “There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”

By this definition, E. B. Sledge’s memoir With the Old Breed is as true a war story as anyone will ever have the courage to write. In it, the Marine Corps veteran recounts scenes on Okinawa too obscene for any newspaper. In fact, he writes, “They were too horrible and obscene even for hardened veterans. . . . It is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane. . . . To me the war was insanity.”

I don’t normally read literature (and memoirs are literature) so didactically. But Sledge needs to be read and reread in an age where stories from the Iraq war—stories that are gentle, even civilized, by comparison—can cause an uproar and provoke overheated charges of disloyalty (see the Scott Beauchamp affair at The New Republic). Yes, war is hell. It’s easy to pay lip service. But what does that mean?

Go read Sledge and find out.

PREVIOUSLY: Tim O’Brien is full of shit & psychobabble.

IMAGE: A US Navy lieutenant makes a mascot out of a Japanese skull.

Comments

[Trevor]

See also for a disagreement with Tim O'Brien: Bill Kristol's attempt to find a pony at the bottom of the pile of shit in Iraq in this Time piece. I'll stick with O'Brien, thanks.

Basically Kristol says at least some of these soldiers (those who survive with their sanity) will run for office years from now. Presumably, of course, as Republicans lest they find themselves on the wrong end of some future version of the Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth."