Year: 1998
Type: article
Abstract: Even allowing for the many significant differences among eras and conflicts, in the soldiers' voices we discover striking continuities.In the pages of these books young Americans, products of an individualistic, democratic, materialistic culture, repeatedly reveal similar responses to military life and battle.Ordinary Americans thrust into extraordinary circumstances, their testimony fills the reader with, variously, admiration, horror, pity, and-occasionally--disdain and disgust.We see them at their very best and absolute worst.The predominant sense likely to remain, however, is one of profound respect for their fortitude, endurance, and courage.The first of these books, and by far the most ambitious, is Gerald Linderman's The World Within War: America's Combat Experience in World War II.Here Linderman attempts to do for the World War II infantryman and Marine rifleman what he did so masterfully for Civil War soldiers in his classic Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War--capture the shock of combat on fighting men and depict how they reacted to and were ultimately transformed by their experiences.Nevertheless, although cast in the same vein as the Civil War book, this latest effort is different in one key regard.Where Embattled Courage required an imaginative reconstruction of Johnny Reb's and Billy Yank's world views--due largely to 19th-century veterans' relatively greater reticence to lay bare their feelings than their 20th-century counterparts--The World Within War is much more a work of synthesis.Linderman draws upon an extensive scholarly literature and many graphic memoirs to construct his argument.The World Within War is a worthy successor to the earlier work and deserves a wide readership.Linderman's analysis unfolds in a series of topical chapters that treat such diverse but related phenomena as the differences between soldiers' expectations of combat and the reality they each discovered; coping mechanisms; the GIs' stubborn individualism and resistance to imposed discipline; the appeals of battle; and the inevitable schisms between front lines, rear echelons, and the home front.All of this is well done.The author predictably finds that battle did not conform to soldiers' naive preconceptions.The epigraph to Embattled Courage, supplied by the Roman historian Livy--"Nowhere do events correspond less to men's expectations than in war"--finds an analogue in the bitter words of one veteran quoted in The World Within War: "You know nothing when you enter combat."Following in the footsteps of military sociologist Samuel Stouffer and historian Lee Kennett, Linderman catalogues a coping process entailing some or all of the following: regarding combat as a dirty but necessary "job"; applying combat lessons learned; developing a reliance on combat "intuition"; and seeking refuge in divine intercession, numbness and coarsening, or, ultimately, fatalism ("If a bullet has your name on it . ..").He illustrates how GIs chafed under what they perceived as "chickenshit" discipline, thus validating the memorable riff on that subject supplied by the disillusioned author-veteran Paul Fussell in Wartime.his allegation.The long view, he concludes, demands expertise in many different disciplines, an open mind, and an ability to think "outside the box."Edward Cornish."Forecasts 30 Years Later."The Futurist, 31 (January-February 1997), 45-48.This report card on forecasts made 30 years ago in diverse areas such as medicine, economics, cities, and technologies shows a 68-percent accuracy rate overall.The discussion of where the forecasters went wrong is interesting, and the causes vary.One observation was that forecasters had "failed to reckon with shifts in the factors underlying the trends," a risk alluded to in the books by Peter Schwartz and by Schwarz, Scedin, and Wittrock.Charles W. Taylor.The Relationship of Forecasting to Long-Range Planning.Carlisle Barracks, Pa.: US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute,
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4254897463