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These men's responses to war, and to the act of killing in particular, are as varied as their temperaments, their characters and their individual histories. So it's disheartening to see Bourke try repeatedly to force their ragged, irregular reactions into a single, smooth mold. "With occasional exceptions," she pronounces, "most servicemen killed the enemy with a sense that they were performing a slightly distasteful but necessary job." Where in this bland generalization, the reader may wonder, is the bloodlust of the man who wore a necklace of ears cut from his Vietnamese victims? Where is the wrenching guilt of the fighter who confessed that "after each mission I would vomit for hours and beg God to forgive us for what we were doing"?

An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare By Joanna Bourke Basic Books, 400 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

Bourke also airbrushes out details about the men themselves: their ages, their military ranks, their hometowns. The soldiers' voices, as affecting as they are, come to us oddly disembodied, like letters floating down from the sky. But the book's most serious slip is its careless conglomeration of British, American and Australian soldiers, fighting in the world wars and Vietnam. Bourke often fails to identify a speaker's nationality and, on occasion, even the war in which he served. Surely it's a radically different experience, with distinct social and historical import, to be a Briton deep in the trenches of the Somme or a G.I. landing on the beaches of Normandy or an Australian skulking through the jungles of Vietnam. But Bourke would have us believe that the experience of war, a great, granite-faced monolith, is essentially the same for every individual in every era.

Exasperatingly, Bourke points out the pitfall that lies before her, then proceeds to jump right in. "Intimate acts of killing in war are committed by historical subjects imbued with language, emotion and desire," she emphasizes in her introduction. That rich specificity, however, is soon subsumed by Bourke's own desire to reduce the experience of fighting in wartime -- a human endeavor at least as emotionally complex and varied as having a childhood, or falling in love -- to a simple formula. In one particularly murky passage, she writes: "There is no 'experience' independent of the ordering mechanisms of grammar, plot and genre and this is never more the case when attempting to 'speak' the ultimate transgression -- killing another human being."

It's the specifics that make this book valuable -- as when Bourke notes that when trauma (and not lack of learning) rendered these warriors wordless, their bodies spoke for them. "Soldiers who had bayoneted men in the face developed hysterical tics of their own facial muscles," she reports. "Stomach cramps seized men who had knifed their foes in the abdomen. Snipers lost their sight."

That's the kind of needle-sharp detail that ushers us into the vivid, fantastical world of war as it felt to fight it -- a world that dims and wavers whenever she returns to her flat generalizations. Bourke's writing is mercifully free of academic or military jargon, and it is occasionally gratifyingly fresh, as when she writes that even though "the martial imagination was obsessed with jabbing and stabbing," "bayonets were more likely to be stained with jam than blood." But more often her prose is dull and repetitive, and in its diffuseness obscures as much as it reveals. In this book, at least, the eloquence problem is the author's alone.
salon.com | Nov. 15, 1999

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