Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steal, trans. M. Hofmann, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London, 2003, 289pp.
Robert Leckie, Helmet for My Pillow, Ibooks, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2001, 324pp.
Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War, Scribner, London, 2003, 260pp.
Review Essay by: Russell Parkin
Combat memoirs written by soldiers form a unique genre in the literature of war. Much military literature concentrates on the sweep of battle. Autobiographies of generals and other senior figures, although often deeply personal, almost inevitably have a broader perspective. Only narratives of combat—the soldier’s experience of war—provide us with intimate accounts of battle. They can be compared to the view obtained by looking through binoculars, being at once both detailed and circumscribed. For the great military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz, combat was the very essence of warfare. In order to underline this point, he compared combat to cash payments in commerce, since both actions are necessary for their respective enterprises to proceed. The three works reviewed in this essay were selected as much for their chronological spread within the century just past as for their literary merit. Together they provide snapshots of the deadly commerce of industrialised warfare between 1914 and 1991.
Ernst Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel) was first published in 1920 but did not appear in its first English translation until 1929. The late 1920s and early 1930s were also years in which many British veterans were releasing their war memoirs. In the main, these British works portrayed World War I in the same tragic light favoured by later writers such as Alan Clark, who helped to popularise the idea that British Tommies had been ‘lions led by donkeys’. It is difficult to imagine a greater contrast to this customary view of the war than Storm of Steel. The animating spirit of Jünger’s book seems to echo the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s belief—it is the good war that hallows any cause.
In the course of an eventful and longer-than-usual life (1895–1998), Jünger was a controversial and mercurial character. During the 1930s and 1940s, he opposed Hitler and even wrote an allegorical novel attacking Nazi ideas. He eventually came to reject the bellicosity that marks Storm of Steel as a work apart from more typical World War I memoirs. However, those shifts all lay in the future. In 1913, the idealistic Jünger had run away to Algeria with visions of joining the French Foreign Legion, in an attempt to live the dream of many young men of his generation. The following year he joined the German Army on 1 August, and from late 1914 he served in the trenches until he was wounded in late 1918. Along the way the seventeen-year-old recruit became a decorated junior officer, the youngest lieutenant ever to receive the pour le Mérite.
Storm of Steel celebrates the experience of total war. The book is based on Jünger’s wartime diaries. The reader retains a rough sense of chronology, but it is Jünger’s ability as a writer—as a perceptive observer of both himself and others—that makes Storm of Steel such a powerful work. As depicted by Jünger, the microcosm of the trenches is a world with many similarities to the heroic warrior society of Homer’s Iliad. As in Homeric society, the structured nature of military life is such that a man’s place in the ranks determines both his authority and his duties. Moreover, there is a very clear understanding of what these duties are and what actions fail to meet the proper performance of duty. A man and his actions are identical. Thus Jünger’s epitaph for a fellow junior officer—the short, overweight and ungainly Eisen—is ‘... brave puny men are always to be preferred to strong cowards, as was shown over and over ...’.
Death is a certainty. Jünger gives another colleague the Homeric-sounding sobriquet, ‘Paulicke, whose days were also numbered.’ Random, powerful and impersonal forces constantly reinforce the fragility of life in the trenches. Jünger describes the unique sounds made by various calibres of British and German artillery with all the detail and nuance that an ornithologist might use to describe different birdsongs, but he is also aware that this knowledge cannot save him from death. Returning wounded from a raid on the British trenches, Jünger recalls his sense of relief at being alive, but also the toll that the experience has taken on his nerves. Lying sleepless on his pallet in a dugout, he notes: ‘I had a sensation of a sort of supreme awakeness—as if I had a little electric bell going off somewhere in my body.’ A few sentences later he says: ‘These short expeditions, where a man takes his life in his hands, were a good means of testing our mettle and interrupting the monotony of trench life. There is nothing worse for a soldier than boredom.’
Jünger exults in the war. He gives himself over to it totally, not expecting to survive it, but relishing the experience nonetheless. This existentialism makes Storm of Steel a challenging book for modern readers. While not indifferent to the suffering that surrounds him, Jünger has developed a strength of body and mind that makes him the type of man Clausewitz described as ‘a proper instrument of war.’
Helmet for My Pillow is Robert Leckie’s memoir of his time as a United States Marine during World War II in the Pacific. Leckie had attempted to enlist on 8 December 1941, but a requirement that he be circumcised delayed his enlistment until early January 1942. From this awkward beginning, he has gone on to become one of America’s best known writers of popular military history, with over thirty books to his credit.
The talent that has made Leckie such a popular historian is evident in this narrative of his wartime experiences. From boot camp on Parris Island to battle with the First Marine Division on Guadalcanal, New Britain and Peliliu, Leckie’s memoirs evoke the life of a marine infantryman. Unlike Jünger, who makes little reference to life outside the trenches, Leckie provides his readers with a detailed account of a debauched interlude in wartime Melbourne filled with frenetic indulgence in booze and sex, punctuated by time in the brig.
By this stage of the war, the young Leckie had been decorated for his role as a machine gunner in a night action at the Tenaru River on Guadalcanal. The Marines had landed without opposition but were soon engaged in heavy combat. With little experience of jungle fighting, Leckie records the stresses placed on a man in the jungle at night: ‘I could not see, but I dared not close my eyes lest the darkness crawl beneath my eyelids and suffocate me. I could only hear. My ears became my being and I could hear specks of life that crawled beneath my clothing ... I could hear the darkness gathering against me and the silences that lay between the moving things.’ When the sun rose on the Tenaru River the next morning, more than nine hundred dead Japanese littered the jungle.
Far more than Jünger’s infrequent and sometimes heavy attempts at humour, Helmet for My Pillow is enlivened by Leckie’s gift for irreverent observation and the apt epithet, which illustrates the close companionship of men at war. Officers are known by names such as Lieutenant Big Picture or Major Major-Share, while comrades rejoice in pseudonyms such as White-Man (a bigot), The Scholar (an avid reader) and The Chuckler (perpetually good humoured). In common with Jünger, Leckie is highly self-aware. Briefly admitted to a hospital ward for psychological casualties, he confronts his own fear of madness. The insight that this pause affords him is the understanding that it is not the relentless reality of death, the enemy, horrific wounds or the jungle that brings men to insanity in war. Rather, for some, it is the psychological pressure from within themselves that engenders a despair so bottomless that they become ghosts ‘walking the ward with silent lips and blank eyes.’
Like Jünger, Leckie probably only survived the war because he was badly wounded. Helmet for My Pillow was not published until over a decade after the war had ended. As such, the book is a meditation by the mature Leckie on his rite of passage. He is not without a sense of survivor’s guilt that Jünger could never express; Leckie questions too what it was that he ultimately fought for, especially since civilians ‘heavy with the girth of affluence’ could never understand what motivated a combat veteran. His answer was simple and stoic: ‘For myself, a memory and the strength of ordeal sustained; for my son, a priceless heritage; for my country, sacrifice.’
Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead is a war memoir from the same lineage as Storm of Steel and Helmet for My Pillow. However, unlike Jünger and Leckie, Swofford, perhaps mirroring his times, is more self-indulgent in the telling of his story. Rather than the straight narrative of the classic war memoir, Jarhead uses flashbacks and jumps into the future. These techniques give the narrative tempo but also mean that the book occasionally reads like a film script. Almost predictably, the story traces Swofford’s loss of idealism and the steady growth of a deep cynicism resulting from his experiences in boot camp, at war and in a rootless civilian existence after he is discharged.
When Swofford joins the Marines in peacetime, the reason he gives is: ‘to impose domestic structure upon my life, to find a home’. The reader has already been introduced to Swofford’s disintegrating family. The author’s father served in Vietnam, and his inability to settle into postwar life is destroying his family. Despite this difficulty, and the uneasy relationship that Swofford has with his father, he has the vague idea ‘that manhood had to do with war, and war with manhood, and to no longer be just a son, I needed someday to fight’. In contrast to Jünger’s and Leckie’s, Swofford’s motivation for becoming a soldier is ambiguous.
After boot camp, Swofford becomes a member of a highly trained Surveillance and Target Acquisition – Scout-Sniper Platoon in the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Division. These are the men that Swofford shows us as they react ‘to the difficulties of life, war, and service in the US Marines.’ Their war is the 1991 Gulf War, and to prepare themselves for combat the platoon rent all the war movies that they can find. They also purchase ‘a hell of a lot of beer’. Explaining the logic behind this drunken film festival, Swofford says: ‘We concentrate on Vietnam films because it’s the most recent war and the successes and failures of that war helped to write our training manuals.’ The absurdity of preparing for a war in the desert by watching films about Vietnam hardly seems to register with the members of Swofford’s platoon.
Once in the Saudi desert, the platoon moves progressively from one camp to the next, always drawing closer to the Kuwaiti border. At one of these staging camps, Swofford contemplates suicide but is talked out of it by his friend Troy. The men of the platoon are forced to play football in the desert while wearing their gas masks and protective chemical–biological suits because reporters are visiting their base. During the war, the only dead Iraqis they see have been killed by the concussion of a blast from a bomb called a Daisy Cutter—a smaller version of the Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb used in the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Swofford describes the Iraqi corpses in their bunker as ‘hunched over, hands covering their ears, as though they had been waiting in dread .... dried, discoloured blood gathers around their eyes and noses and mouths’. Even when the war ends, the men of the Surveillance and Target Acquisition – Scout-Sniper Platoon are left out in the desert, forgotten by their headquarters.
These incidents contribute to the overwhelming feelings of irrationality and nihilism that dominate Swofford’s memoir. The mood of Jarhead has little in common with Jünger’s existential approach to war in the trenches or Leckie’s stoicism. Where Jünger gives himself totally to the war and lives in the extreme of each moment, Swofford is continually discontented and his approach to almost everything he does is hesitant. Leckie accepts the consequences of both fate and his own actions with equanimity. By comparison, when Swofford addresses his reader directly at the end of the book, he rages bitterly: ‘I have gone to war and now can issue my complaint. I can sit on my porch and complain all day. And you must listen ... Indolence and cowardice do not drive me—despair drives me.’ This is the same despair that Leckie confronted and overcame in the psychiatric ward of the US Navy hospital. After his discharge, for a brief time, Swofford became the ghost of a man that Leckie described. His most bitter protest, one that is ultimately impotent, is reserved for war itself: ‘This will never end. Sorry.’ Fortunately for Swofford, the writing of his memoir seems to have become his personal salvation.
The despair that manifests itself in the conclusion to Swofford’s memoir is rooted in a shift in the understanding of the nature and use of violence in Western culture. British academic, Christopher Coker, believes that Western nations have adopted an instrumental view of war. In the past, wars were all-embracing contests. The first great work of Western literature, The Iliad, records a war in which the bravery of individual warriors is tested precisely because the survival of their entire society is at stake. World War I and World War II held a similar risk for the liberal democracies. However, during the second half of the 20th century, the use of violence, usually by technological means, became just another instrument of government policy.
Between 1900 and 1970, the existence of compulsory military service schemes in most Western nations ensured that almost all adult males had some experience in the armed forces. However, social and demographic trends during the last four decades of the 20th century have significantly altered attitudes to warfare and military service. The result is that, in many Western armed forces, fewer and fewer personnel are directly engaged in combat. In some countries, such as Australia, women now constitute around 15 per cent of the total strength of the armed services. Females also tend to fulfil vital technical roles in the fields of intelligence, communications and logistics. Moreover, the all-volunteer armed forces of most liberal democracies make up such a small percentage of a nation’s total population that most people—including politicians, academics and other opinion makers—have no real understanding, let alone experience, of military life. Nations can now even be involved in limited conflicts, such as Kosovo, without disrupting the everyday existence of the majority of their citizens. In the 21st century, defence is in danger of becoming simply another highly specialised area of the state bureaucracy. Writing in the 1880s, Nietzsche anticipated the impact of these trends on the role of man in war, ‘I see many soldiers: would that I saw many warriors! “Uniform” one calls what they wear: would that what it conceals were not uniform!’
At the end of a century of industrialised warfare, combat remained a deadly transaction, but something fundamental had changed. By the 1990s, the exultant existentialism of Jünger and even Leckie’s stoic endurance have been replaced by the forlorn image of soldiers who must refer to films in order to glimpse even an imprecise representation of war. At the same time, technological precision has enabled weapons to become many times more lethal. The Daisy Cutter bomb, which falls silently from an aircraft and kills with the certainty of a concussive overpressure of 1000 pounds per square inch, has replaced the no less deadly, but more random, barrage of artillery shells described by Jünger. Narratives of combat such as Storm of Steel, Helmet for My Pillow and Jarhead not only act as a barometer of changes in warfare, but serve as a reminder that war is a tragic, emotional and, above all, human experience, not just a technological and political technique.
