On Violence

(To read the rest of our series on Band of Brothers, please click here.)

In the second section of Dan Simmons’ wonderful science fiction novel Hyperion, a soldier tells his story. During his military training on the planet Mars--this is a science fiction novel after all--Fedmahn Kassad enters a virtual reality machine that recreates historical battles from Agincourt to the Somme to Gettysburg. The recreations feel real; everything looks, sounds and tastes right, perfect.

I think about this hypothetical machine when I rewatch Band of Brothers. I wonder--as many viewers probably do--what it would be like to fight in the Battle of the Bulge. Or to parachute into Normandy. World War II seems to me like a particularly ideal war to fight in (if you’re in a virtual reality machine). Unlike wars before 1900, the doctors use antibiotics. Unlike World War I, the fighting isn’t dull and senseless trench warfare. And unlike most wars after 1950, this one isn’t a boring insurgency.

Of course, I would only like to fight these wars if I had a virtual reality machine. Because over all other thoughts and reactions, the same worry pops up everytime I re-watch Band of Brothers: what would I have done?

In the forests of Bastogne, watching artillery shells explode, shattering trees and killing men, what the hell would anyone do? (My guess for 99% of the population: mentally break down.) Would I jump out of an airplane into a combat zone? (Hell no.) What about storming a beach or a fortified position? What about invading the German lines at night? Could I have done what that medic did in Bastogne, repeatedly running to wounded comrades to vainly try to save their lives? How many people have that strength?

I’d like to think, rather conceitedly, that I’d shoot straight and confidently, dodging sniper fire to rescue my fellow soldiers and earning silver stars like trophies at a little league game. But I’m realistic enough to know that I might just piss myself instead.

Two episodes of Band of Brothers, in particular, beg these questions. The first is “The Breaking Point”. I watch “The Breaking Point” with awe, admiring and fearing a war so ugly, so raw, I don’t know how those soldiers did it or how they survived. I can’t help but put myself in those men’s shoes and wish I could do what those soldiers did.

Then, there’s “The Last Patrol”.

Last month, Michael C wrote about his connection to the episode. How it spoke to him. Though Michael C and I are twin brothers who weren’t separated at birth, this episode doesn’t speak to me.

You see, unlike Michael C, I’ve never been to war. I haven’t been to Afghanistan or Iraq. In many irreconcilable and important ways, I’ll never understand what he went through. I’ll never understand what it’s like to go to war. I’ve never seen the elephant, to borrow a Civil War phrase.

I admit this with the awareness that these words will probably always be held against me by conservative milbloggers. It’s been happening for as long as we’ve been blogging. Someone will find the blog, disagree with what we have to say, and say that, since we’re non-soldiers, we shouldn’t be allowed to write. (Of course, Michael C was a soldier, but that’s not really the point.)

Oddly, the veteran soldiers of Easy Company do the same thing in “The Last Patrol”. When they meet a new guy, they make fun of him. Or they alienate them. (Leibgott, in particular, comes off poorly.) It offends me, to my core. Take the new lieutenant for instance. He's a victim of timing--being born too early--more than anything else. Why trash on him?

But I understand why they feel and act that way. Like me and my brother, a distance exists we may never be able to fully bridge...even if I had I virtual reality machine.

(To read the rest of our series on Band of Brothers, please click here.)

Each episode of Band of Brothers has moments of heroism, followed by moments of heartbreak. The series builds on itself too, increasing the emotional tension until, as viewers, we almost can’t take anymore.

By episode eight, “The Last Patrol”, I wanted to scream, “Enough.” Seriously, can this company take anymore?

The men of Easy Company never got the extended R and R they expected (and deserved) after Bastogne. During “The Last Patrol”, Easy Company sits on one side of a river receiving mortar and sniper fire from a German company on the other side. The grunts on each side, American and German, just want the war to end. The leaders still want glory, so regimental headquarters decides to start sending patrols across the river at night to capture prisoners.

More germane to today’s post, “The Last Patrol” introduces us to a new officer, Lieutenant Jones, one year removed from West Point. It also reintroduces us to Pfc. Webster, the Harvard educated English major who, unlike Sgt. Toye, chose to stay in the hospital while Easy went to Bastogne. Toye lost his legs; Webster reports to the company unscathed. The difference is stark: Lt. Jones and Webster enter Germany bright-eyed, optimistic, and healthy, mentally and physically; Easy Company barely fields 80 physically and emotionally unhealthy men.

Unwittingly, the creators also wrote the perfect episode to capture my emotions during war. I showed up late to my battalion’s deployment to Afghanistan, after my men had already lost fellow soldiers. When I took over 4th platoon, many of the guys treated me like Lieutenant Jones.

This episode captures my emotional feelings during deployment better than any other single piece of art, except for maybe The Things They Carried. When I recently rewatched this episode--for the first time since my deployment to Afghanistan--I couldn’t stop saying, “Oh my God, that is exactly how I felt.” Which actually happened several times throughout “The Last Patrol”...

“The feeling you might live through it.”

This thought, which dominated the episode, dominated my thoughts for the last three months of my deployment. My men too. Actually, this thought/feeling hit me/us twice during deployment.

The first time was when we left the Korengal. One day, our battalion headquarters decided that, in two months, our platoon would leave the Korengal for Serkani district. My men--who had watched over half a dozen fellow soldiers in our company die and one of our own lose his legs--felt that they might actually survive.

Four months after that, we started fielding MRAPs. Riding in these vehicles felt like riding in giant lifesavers,  impenetrable boxes that could survive a nuclear blast if they needed. (They couldn’t, but felt like they could.) Insurgents had started planting IEDs in the roads. Driving around in MRAPs just felt safer.

From June on we had the feeling that we would probably make it home.

“Ghost patrols”

I never ran one. It’s illegal. When he chose to do this, Major Winters specifically disregarded the orders of his commander. By this point in Band of Brothers, Winters has already cemented his position as uber-officer extraordinaire. Most viewers sympathize with Winters and Easy Company avoiding the patrol. I just want to point out most battalion commanders I knew would fire on the spot any lieutenant or captain caught running ghost patrols.

And they still happen constantly in war.

“Toye broke out of the hospital.”

The men of Easy company greet Pfc. Webster by saying this when he finally leaves the hospital. Unlike other soldiers who escaped the Army medical system to rejoin their units, Webster took as long as he could. Webster missed the hardest part of Easy’s time in Europe, so he’ll always be the guy who missed out. As a new lieutenant, like Lt. Jones, I got a slightly different question...

“What took you so long to get here?”

At some point, Nixon asked the lieutenant when he graduated. Lt. Jones says, “December 6th”. Nixon says, “D-day?” And laughs, implying, “What took you so long to get here?” In my case, U.S. Army European Command only scheduled, “Individual Readiness Training” every two months. Regulations said I had to attend five days of utterly nonsensical training before I was fully “qualified” to deploy.

But how do you explain that to guys who had watched one of their favorite NCOs lose all feeling in his arm by a bullet? And countless other friends die? Or a well-liked specialist lose both his legs? You can’t, and you’ll always be...the guy who missed out.

As a result, taking over fourth platoon will be the single best and worst job I have ever had, and possibly will ever have. Don’t get me wrong, I loved fourth platoon’s “Helldivers’, and I wouldn’t trade my deployment with them for anything in the world (except to have shown up earlier). But I don’t think any job will demand more from me than gaining the respect of battle hardened veterans as a brand new lieutenant.

After hating the Hurt Locker, I was worried that maybe my military experience had ruined war films for me.

I’ve heard this from Vietnam vets who can’t watch any films about that era without thinking, “What a load of hogwash.” Well, when it comes to World War II, I can still relate to it. Especially this episode of Band of Brothers.

(To read the rest of our series on Band of Brothers, please click here. To read the rest of our "War at its Worst" series, please click here.)

When Band of Brothers first came out, I wasn’t able to catch every episode on its first airing. (Band of Brothers premiered in the pre-DVR era. Odd to think that just ten years ago, we couldn’t record television shows.) I watched the first three episodes, then missed a few in a row. I came back to watch the two episodes that took place in Bastogne.

Then, as now, those episodes remain my favorite.

Mythically known as the “The Good War” (thank you, Studs Terkel), the American public doesn’t question or criticize World War II like they do other past wars. The art inspired by World War II usually doesn’t have the same nuance. The myth of “The Good War” has perpetuated itself throughout the decades. If I had to level a criticism at Band of Brothers, a series that I deply admire, it would be that it embraces this sepia-toned remembrance of a golden age, when war was real war and America fought to stop evil incarnate, no grey areas allowed. If you don’t believe me, just rewatch the series’ introduction...filmed in sepia-tone to a grand orchestral score. Or the final two episodes. I don’t blame the creators; in today’s culture, they couldn’t avoid it.

“The Breaking Point” and “Bastogne” cut through that false nostalgia, and I love them for it. As Sherman said, “War is all hell.” As Tim O’Brien’s narrator elaborates in The Things They Carried,

“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. 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.”

“The Breaking Point” and “Bastogne” pledge allegiance to obscenity and evil. The soldiers on each side didn’t fight a “good war” in the forests of Bastogne. They fought a war at its worst, at its coldest and at its ugliest.

In “Bastogne”, a medic scrambles for supplies, stealing medicine and bandages off bodies of dead soldiers and civilians, begging, bartering and stealing whatever he can. Men suffer in the cold, unable to do anything more than sit together, half-freezing to death. Driving into town in “Bastogne”, the medic’s jeep casually passes a mound of dead bodies stacked on top of one another. The episode ends with a scene of pure hell: the Axis have bombed the hospital/cathedral, everything is on fire and death falls from the sky. All the men from Easy Company the medic has been transporting from the front lines to the hospital have, tragically, died.

While the shelling in “Bastogne” scares the hell out of me, the shelling in “The Breaking Point” is worse. Of all of my “War at its Worst” posts, watching the men of Easy Company helplessly getting shelled is the most terrifying. Sitting in fox holes getting shelled with nothing to protect themselves, the men lose their composure. Lt. Compton sees his friends maimed, and leaves the front lines. One man starts digging a hole in the frozen earth with his bare hands.

I couldn’t find a video on Youtube that really captured these episodes. Instead, I think the words of the veterans who survived are enough. I’ve included them below.

“Bastogne”

“When we left for Bastogne, we were short of equipment. We didn’t have enough ammunition. We didn’t have enough warm clothes. But we had confidence that our higher military authorities would get to us whatever we needed.”

“And there was a ridge with a treeline. We were dug in on that ridge. The Germans knew right where we were, and they really gave us a shellacking.”

“Well, like in Bastogne, we were down to one round per man there for a while. Fog was in, they couldn’t drop, resupply us. Every time they tried to drop supplies to us, they dropped them to the Germans.”

“One of the guys got hit in the arm with a piece of shrapnel. It took his arm off above the elbow. As they were taking him out he said, ‘Get my wristwatch off my arm.’”

“Then a medic came along and he really saved my life, because he stuck a syrette in the key position of morphine.”

“Even today, a real cold night, we go to bed, my wife’ll tell ya, that the first thing I say, ‘I’m glad I’m not in Bastogne.’”

“The Breaking Point”

“I’ve seen death. I’ve seen my friends, my men being killed. And it doesn’t take too many days of that and you’re changed dramatically.”

“I was hungry, had no food. Didn’t have much ammunition. It was cold, we didn’t have no clothes. You couldn’t build a fire. You build a fire, some crazy thing’d shoot at you.”

“Everywhere you would look you would see dead people, now. Dead soldier here, there. Ours, theirs. Then civilians besides dead animals. So death was all over.”

“You don’t have a chance, when your friends go down, you know, to really take care care of them as you might, especially if you’re under attack, moving, whatever. And I withstood it well, but I had a lot of trouble in later life because those events would come back and you never forget ‘em.”

(To read the rest of our series on Band of Brothers, please click here.)

Band of Brothers reaches its emotional peak during the end of “The Breaking Point”. As they emerged from the Ardennes, the 101st had transformed into the “battered bastards of Bastogne”.

This clip, around minute 1:30, shows the emotional toll on the men of Easy Company as they spend the night resting in a church. Listening to a children’s choir, First Sergeant Lipton tries to compile a roster for Easy Company. As he narrates, the soldiers who have died, lost it, or gotten wounded disappear from view.

As First Sergeant Lipton describes, Easy Company entered Belgium with 145 soldiers. After the Battle of the Bulge, they had 63.

That calculation answers a question for World War II that I (Michael C) asked for our 500th post anniversary:

1. If you are a civilian, how many casualties are you willing to risk to win our wars?

2. If you are an officer, how many of your own men are you willing to sacrifice to win our wars?

The commanding officers of Easy Company were willing to sacrifice over eighty soldiers simply to secure Belgium.

If that answer sounds callous, harsh or uncaring, it is. War is, fundamentally. a series of life or death decisions. It means the deaths of foreigners (another post for another time) and the deaths of Americans. Before America starts, joins or goes to any war, as a country, we need to answer the question: how much will we sacrifice?

In World War II, President Roosevelt, Congress and our generals knew that victory would require sacrifice--hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of men. Still, they gave our soldiers those orders. Consider...

- 9,000 U.S. soldiers died in the Allied Invasion of Sicily. Another 5,000 died in the Battle of Salerno.

- In a handful of days, during the invasion of Normandy, the Americans lost another 14 to 19,000 men.

- During Operation Market Garden, the U.S. lost 4,000 more men.

- During the Battle of the Bulge, around 19,000 more Americans died, with thousands more missing and wounded.

In Europe, millions of civilians perished. Recent estimates place the number of Russian dead at 26.6 million. Poland lost anywhere between 5.6 and 5.8 million people as well. The United Kingdom lost nearly half a million people. France lost a little over half a million people too.

Incomprehensibly large numbers can numb us to the pain. Our eyes glaze over. Band of Brothers shows how the American men (and boys) sacrificed.

They die as planes explode in “Day of Days”.

They get shot in the neck in “Carentan”.

They die from sniper fire in “The Replacements”.

They die by friendly fire in “Crossroads”.

They die by artillery in “Bastogne”.

They die by machine gun fire in “The Breaking Point”.

They die by grenade shrapnel in “Points”.

Easy Company wasn’t alone in this sacrifice. Hundreds of other companies throughout the European and Pacific theaters felt the same pain and sacrifice.

This article--and the questions I asked during our 500th anniversary week--emphasize a point neglected about war in our modern discourse: war means people (civilians, enemies and our soldiers) will die. Phrases like “heroes”, “support the troops” and “enforce our will on the enemy” all sanitize warfare. This sanitation hides the cost of war.

War means dead troops. Dead Afghans. Dead Iraqis. Dead Americans. Dead British. Dead French. Dead Italians. Dead Polish. Dead Czech Republicans.

War means sacrifice. Selfless sacrifice. In World War II, America was willing to sacrifice everything to win because the lives of millions of Britons, French and possibly Americans were at stake. During World War II, the generals, colonels, captains and officers of our military knew that thousands of young men would die.

Are we--as Americans--still ready to make that sacrifice in our current wars? I don’t think so, and it says something about the wars we choose to pursue.

(To read the rest of our series on Band of Brothers, please click here.)

Luckily for Michael C, his two weeks of mid-tour leave during his deployment to Afghanistan coincided with a banquet in honor of our dad winning his high school’s “Teacher of the Year” award. Our dad asked him to wear his uniform.

Michael C wore his ACUs to the ceremony. (Though it seemed a little informal to me, civilians didn’t think so. A young six year old asked Michael C to take a picture with him.) Later, when I asked Michael C why he didn’t wear his dress uniform, he told me he didn’t want to be mistaken for the waiting staff.

He's not alone. Generals prefer ACUs as well.

Most of the posts in our Band of Brothers’ series deal with serious issues. Executing prisoners. War at its worst. Rules of engagement. Life or death issues. Take, for example, the very emotional episode “Crossroads”: Framed around the writing of an after-action report, Lt. Winters shoots a young German soldier, leads an attack, captures Germans, and gets promoted.

I’m going to ignore all that, because all I could think watching the episode was, “Damn, World War II era dress uniforms sure looked good.”

Is this complaint inconsequential? Maybe. But it’s equally infuriating. To me, and Michael C (though he didn’t want to write this post, he agrees with me), the current military service uniform is terrible. It’s ugly. It’s objectively not a good uniform (though I don’t have scientific evidence to prove this).

For those who don’t know what the current uniform looks like, here it is:

This just looks bad, wrong. As I wrote above, and as Michael C has told me, it looks like something a waiter would wear. My biggest criticism is that it doesn’t look like an Army uniform. The blues and blacks--in lieu of traditional Army browns and greens--make it look like something from the Navy.

Now, compare that to Lt. Winters and Lt. Nixon:

I hate complaining about something without providing an alternative. In this situation, the alternative is obvious: go back to a uniform inspired by World War II era uniforms. The uniforms that the officers and sergeants wear in Band of Brothers look terrific. They look noble. Better.

Just a thought.

(To read the rest of our series on Band of Brothers, please click here.)

Today, we continue yesterday’s discussion of one of the most thought-provoking scenes in Band of Brothers: Lt. Spiers (allegedly) executing German POWs in the second episode of the series.

Michael C

In some ways, I’m not in love with this debate. I worry that--especially with the crew we have lined up to debate the issue--we will all come out on the same side. Killing a calm group of captured German POWs seems inherently wrong...so I don’t know how to argue that it’s not. Shouldn’t everyone say that?

A similar scene from Saving Private Ryan, though, makes a much more compelling case for murdering prisoners. In the scene, Technical Sergeant Mike Horvath (played by Tom Sizemore), having climbed up the bluffs of Normandy, runs across two German soldiers as they stumble out of a German bunker, putting up their hands to surrender. Horvath pretends like he can’t understand them, then shoots them.

At the time--when I was still in middle school in 1997--I didn’t understand why he did this, especially mocking the men he was about to shoot, as Matty P wrote about yesterday. My dad, playing devil’s advocate, explained the logic: in the hectic beach invasion, the Allies didn’t have time to take prisoners. This was war after all.

Though he didn’t say it then, I feel like the hypothetical is, “What would the Allies have done if the entire German force on Normandy had just surrendered? What would we have done with them all?” To which I have to say...

“Yeah, exactly.”

I don’t care about the morality or the ethics or the legality of the two scenes. Forget those. Sergeant Horvath and Lieutenant Spiers’ actions piss me off from a purely rational and tactical perspective.

We want our enemies to surrender.

We want to let them surrender, and protect them when they do. We want our opponents to know that, if they stop fighting, no harm will come to them. We want them to know we won’t torture them if they surrender either. If our enemies trust us to do them no harm, they will end up surrendering in droves as soon as they know the fight is lost. As Sun Tzu said or King Leonidas knew, when the choice is fight or die, you’ll fight like hell. If the entire German Army at Normandy had surrendered, then we would have taken them all prisoner.

During the Persian Gulf war, whole divisions gave up rather than face U.S. annihilation. In the Iraq war invasion twelve years later, whole units gave up instead of fighting. Because these units rose their white flags, American lives were saved. Lots of lives. Soldiers in WWII sacrificed then so that whole Iraqi units would surrender now, saving U.S. lives. The characters in films who shot prisoners put their fellow and future soldiers’ lives at risk. Maybe not immediately, maybe not even in their own unit, but someday. If our opponents believe they can’t surrender, then future Americans will have to fight them to the death.

In World War II, the Japanese warrior ethos inspired their troops to refuse to surrender. Russian atrocities proved that, in future wars, no one should surrender to Russian soldiers. The American experience in World War II, and since, has been to place the ultimate protection to surrendering POWs, so all our enemies know: give up and you won’t have to die; you can trust us.

Our military still practices this ideal. As a cadet planning squad missions, we started planning for the presence of POWs on the battlefield. American and NATO rules of engagement keep surrendering units safe as well. The leaders of our military (and most of our allies) understand the value of letting the opponent give up.

Some of our civilian leaders don’t understand the importance of this. CIA agents (or their contractors) who tortured prisoners violated this ethos, and encouraged future jihadis to fight, not surrender. Kill/capture missions that mostly end in “kill” don’t understand this ethos.

What Lieutenant Spiers didn’t understand--but what Lieutenant Winters did--is that sacrifice means risking your own life so the lives of your children, grandchildren and so on will improve. By violating the laws of war--executing POWs, torturing detainees, unlawfully detaining people indefinitely--we risk the lives of our descendants.

(To read the rest of our series on Band of Brothers, please click here.)

In the second episode of Band of Brothers, “Day of Days”. Pvt. Malarkey walks by a group of captured German prisoners. While he’s making fun of the POWs, he discovers that one of the prisoners hails from Eugene, Oregon, his home state. They chat, then Malarkey leaves.

Lieutenant Spiers--in an apocryphal story that may or may not have happened; the series stays intentionally vague on the details--gives the German POWs cigarettes, then executes them with his sub-machine gun.

We’re writing about Band of Brothers because the series asks big questions, and this moment asks one of the biggest questions: when should we kill prisoners? When is it ethical?

Shooting prisoners--or surrendering Germans in the case of another memorable scene in Saving Private Ryan--strides perfectly across the line between right and wrong. On one hand, this is war and sometimes advancing armies don’t have time to take prisoners. On the other, it means killing people who have given up the will to fight.

So I’ve asked Matty P, Michael C and myself to share thoughts about the morality of taking prisoners, and this scene itself.

Eric C

I have three thoughts on this incident.

First, I have to open with a caveat: I don’t know what I would have done in war. I don’t know if I’d shoot straight or run and hide. I’ve never been to war; I can’t say either way.

That said, we (civilians) can make moral judgements about war and soldiers in war, because that’s our right, as citizens. (More on this here and here.)

So I get to my second, more crucial point: on a gut level, killing surrendered prisoners doesn’t make sense to me. Something doesn’t sit right. It violates universal values.

But not always. This Band of Brothers episode shows why. German soldiers actually surrender three times in “Day of Days”. In the first case, Lt. Winters leads an ambush on a German convoy. One man raises his hands in surrender, and the ambushers still shoot him. Next, Lt. Spiers executes surrendered, safely captured German soldiers that one soldier alone could guard. Finally, during the attack on the German artillery battery, in the middle of a battle, a German soldier tries to surrender. Winters knocks him out with the butt of his rifle.

In the first and last example, taking prisoners makes no sense. Situations reversed, even ten seconds earlier, the Germans would have killed the Americans. You can’t take prisoners in the middle of a firefight.

But the Spiers example is unethical. The American advance would arrive shortly. Even if the landing and invasion at Normandy wouldn’t have worked, the prisoners could have been killed later.

Morally, this killing haunts the soldiers. It still haunts Dick Winters. According to Mark Brando, “Winters emphasized to me [Brando] that he took a very dim view of prisoner shooting, that it was not a common mode of behavior in the 506th and that he felt ashamed of any such incidents which might have happened.”

It should.

Finally, as I wrote earlier, we don’t know whether this event actually occurred. According to Brando, there were no eyewitnesses to the event. Then again, would soldiers want to admit to executing prisoners?

Probably not.
   
Matty P

“Look, I washed for supper!” yelled one American soldier to another, mocking the surrendering German soldier he’d just gunned down.

It’s a dark moment from the movie Saving Private Ryan. An American soldier summarily executing a prisoner is evil. But what got to me, the thorn in my craw so to speak, is that it was a joke. That a man’s life--Nazi or not--was a joke.

The rules that govern our societies dictates the preciousness of life. We should never treat the taking life lightly. We punish murderers. In some places, we put them to death. But this is not done lightly. We have trials; trials that can last months.

In that vein, life should be treated with no less respect when at war. Enemy combatants deserve no less than murders in our society, due process. This may not be simple on the battlefield, admittedly. The taking and transport of prisoners cannot endanger those taking the prisoners, but nor should the taking of prisoners be frowned upon because it’s hard or cumbersome. Prisoners are alive, and life deserves consideration.

Eric wrote that war is the opposite of civilization. War does not have the same rules as society, but there are still rules. We are mandated as moral creatures to abide by these rules or doom ourselves to chaos. We take prisoners not because it’s convenient, but because it’s right.

(To read the entire "War Memoirs" series, please click here.)

When Michael C and I began writing screenplays, one of our projects didn’t work. The opening bored the hell out of us. In screenwriting, the first ten pages are the most important ten pages. If they bore a reader, your screenplay will never get read, and, thus, never get made. So we cheated. We included a flash-forward (The literary technique, also called a “prolepsis”, not the cancelled TV show. Damn you, ABC.), showing events from the middle of the screenplay, hopefully enticing a reader to want to know what happened next.

It didn’t work.

Why? Because we cheated. We artificially manipulated the structure and plot to try to make a boring screenplay exciting. We didn’t advance the plot or characters, just superficially covered up larger structural issues. If you’re familiar with On Violence, you may see where this is going...

War memoirs lean on this crutch all the time.

Life isn’t exciting enough on its own. So post-9/11 war memoirs, to address this problem, open up in the middle of a battle, as if to tell the reader, “Go with me here. There will be battles, but first I want to tell you how I became a soldier.” Over half of the post-9/11 war memoirs I’ve reviewed for this memoir project open this way. It happens in memoirs I loved (Kaboom, War, The Forever War, Generation Kill) and the ones I didn’t (This Man’s Army, Joker One, Lone Survivor). Of all these books, only one did it well.

The “flash forward intro” usually occurs mid-battle. The Forever War opens in the battle of Fallujah, but the first chapter cuts all the way back to Afghanistan under pre-9/11 Taliban rule. Joker One begins, literally, with a bang, as Donovan Campbell and his men lie on the floor following an explosion; the second chapter takes the reader back to the beginning, before he deployed. Evan Wright opens Generation Kill getting shot at in a humvee in “another Iraqi town, nameless”; the memoir then opens in Kuwait before Wright even found a platoon to embed with.

Like the false start on our screenplay, these flash-forward introductions don’t move the story forward; they have no narrative or thematic function. In every case, the author never mentions the event again. It made me wonder: were these memoirs written this way, or did an editor just lop off a section in the middle and put it in the front?

(Ironically--for longtime readers of On Violence--Lone Survivor actually uses this technique well, at least better than the other memoirs I’ve read. The plot, if you will, is the most contained. Instead of covering the entirety of Luttrell’s military experience, it covers one specific mission. The opening doesn’t take place mid-battle, but in preparation for the climatic battle at the center of the memoir.)

Some readers may be thinking, “You wanker, time jumping works. What about modern cinema, like Pulp Fiction? Or every film by Christopher Nolan?” To which I respond, “You’re absolutely correct.” I’m not against time jumping in memoirs. In fact, I love it. As avid media consumers, many modern readers/viewers are more sophisticated, which means modern stories are more thematically and narratively sophisticated than ever before.

This applies to war memoirs. Look at both Michael Herr’s Dispatches and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. The former bounces around in time with anecdotes and memories, focusing its chapters on topics (war reporters), themes (loss, depression), or specific locations (Hue City or Khe Sahn). The latter is a short story collection arranged non-chronologically. Both work. Both promote character above story. Both commit to the emotional truth of war, not real life chronology.

Except for the opening time jump, most memoirs never change time again. Commit one way or the other. The Forever War would have worked better non-chronologically, following the example of Herr’s Dispatches. The same goes for Junger’s War, whose chapter titles were organized by theme, but its content by chronology. For Generation Kill, This Man’s Army, and Joker One, I wish each memoir just began at the beginning. Kaboom, which has a great first chapter, could have been written either chronologically or non-chronologically.

Two of my favorite post-9/11 war memoirs did commit to fractured narratives, and the commitment pays off. Brandon Friedman contrasts his war in Afghanistan with his war in Iraq in The War I Always Wanted, to elevate each chapter through the contrast. In Soft Spots, Clint Van Winkle relives his time in Iraq from his post-war viewpoint in America--and there really was no better way to write that story. Both were organized around theme--the loss of innocence and the struggle with PTSD, respectively--and both authors wrote their memoirs with these themes leading the way, not true-to-life chronology.

More memoirists should follow their lead.