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This chapter examines the correlation between the Vietnam War and literary postmodernism in Tim O'Brien's “How to Tell a True War Story,” one of the short stories in the collection The Things They Carried. It considers the main structural weakness in O'Brien's narrative utopia as well as the paradoxes of war in the story. It shows how O'Brien's search for “truth” allows him to explore in a meandering though compelling way many of the rhetorical and moral dilemmas of the would-be anti-war writer. It argues that the story occupies an uncomfortable position between a postmodernist uneasiness with “truth,” on the one hand, and a rational commitment to rules for distinguishing between truth and falsehood, on the other. It suggests that O'Brien's imagination is a cognitive resource and, therefore, ultimately a political tool capable of unveiling the cowardice hidden behind what many call heroism, as well as the way even love can feed the monster of war.

Focusing on Stephen Crane, this chapter examines the most politically charged and profoundly symbolic of American actions: the act of aiming and firing a gun. This act is linked to Crane's short story “The Five White Mice” that extends his analysis of chance, ostensibly through gambling. Expressing his opposition to traditional liberal theories of free will and self-control, Crane links the accurate execution of one's intentions with imperial violence and connects random, aimless shooting with a preferable mode of ruthless egalitarianism. Crane's interest in aimless shooting has its roots in actual developments in the history of firearms and resulting changes in their use in modern battles. His fiction may be interpreted in relation to a set of neglected rifle training manuals and military strategy papers from the turn of the century. His war stories address, and attempt to reconcile, two competing and precisely opposed theories of shooting that were influential at the time: shooting is either chancy or virtually chanceless.

This chapter discusses how the rhetoric of secrecy enters the domestic sphere during and after wartime, and how it intersects with privacy, studying common wartime experiences, including evacuation and conscription, which had various effects on the family group. It includes several war stories. The chapter also discusses the possible effects war and wartime activities might have on the relationships of children and parents.

This chapter aims to eliminate the need for others to learn by trial and error. The practical issues addressed here range from the process of explaining a population-based experiment to the Institutional Review Board (IRB), to the issue of maximizing the effectiveness of a treatment in a population-based experiment. Different disciplines had different problems adapting to the idea of a population-based experiment, and the chapter uses various war stories to illustrate the kinds of problems most likely to plague users from different disciplines. The challenge of producing effective treatments involves simultaneously increasing the extent to which the independent variable is varied and reducing measurement error. Consideration of ethics and human subjects comes into play because there are important limits on what investigators can do by way of manipulation in the context of surveys.

This chapter marks a division of genre as we move from memoirs and testimonies to fiction. While most of the works under consideration are post-war stories, fiction written during the war without knowledge of the aftermath are also discussed. Both nationalist fiction and those critical of war and its aftermath sensitize us to what is at stake in remembering the foundational moment of Bangladesh. In their gaps and fissures lie the uncertain maps of the paths yet to be charted. Ranging from fiction that casts the suffering mother of a guerrilla and a martyr as a part of nationalistic lore to the victim of wartime rape running for cover in post-war Bangladesh, to the fear and anxieties of minorities after the war, authors articulate the narratives and tongues buried at the sites of national mythmaking. Works by authors such as Anwar Pasha and Selina Hossain are discussed.

This chapter examines the development of future-war fiction from 1871–1900. In 1871, the combined forces of press, politics and population sparked a chain reaction of future-war stories which continued unabated until the outbreak of the First World War. From 1871 onwards not a year went by without the appearance of a tale of the war-to-come in Britain, France or Germany. As these tales of the war-to-come grew in numbers from the 1880s onwards, the range of their preoccupations expanded so that by the end of the nineteenth century a paradigm of military and political possibilities had come into existence both in Europe and in the United States.

Unfortunately, coming to terms with disability and trauma are all too familiar foes for American combat veterans, many of whom receive inadequate, delayed, or nonexistent treatment options upon returning home. We conclude this volume with chapter 10, “Falling Out of Performance: Pragmatic Breakdown in Veterans’ Storytelling,” in which Kristiana Willsey provides new insights into the ways in which U.S. military veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan make meaning and process trauma through the sharing of narratives. She argues that naturalizing the labor of narrative—by assuming stories are inherently transformative, redemptive, or unifying—obscures the responsibilities of the audience as co-authors, putting the burden on veterans to both share their experiences of war, and simultaneously scaffold those experiences for an American public that (with the ongoing privatization of the military and the ever-shifting fronts of global warfare) is increasingly alienated from its military. Importantly, Willsey asserts that the public exhortations in which veterans tell their stories in an effort to cultivate a kind of cultural catharsis can put them in an impossible position: urged to tell their war stories; necessitating the careful management of those stories for audiences uniquely historically disassociated from their wars; and then conflating the visible management of those stories with the “spoiled identity” of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

This chapter considers recent stories about the Iraq War. These stories describe the accidental killing of a child, eliciting feelings of guilt, helplessness, and frustration in soldiers fighting a war in which choices are impossible—not because they are morally ambiguous, but because often there is very little time or leeway to make a choice in the first place. Compared to their Vietnam counterparts, the soldiers who wrote these stories had even less agency. The death of a child is undeniably a bad thing, but in these circumstances almost impossible to avoid. Afterward, soldiers felt burdened by guilt and shame, even though those events were hardly the result of their careful, deliberate actions. The chapter also discusses the film The Hurt Locker (2009), which addresses the problems posed by suicide bombers, sectarian violence, urban warfare, and explosives that can be triggered by seemingly innocuous people and technology.

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s main themes. The book offers a philosophical reflection upon forms of violence that regularly occur in actual wars but do not often factor into the stories told about war. These stories—from Homer and Virgil to Kant, Clausewitz, Goya, Freud, Schmitt, and Derrida—revolve around killing and death. Through readings of these histories and texts, it is shown that war is among the most important achievements of human culture; that it is a complex institution governed by a system of idealized conventions or rituals; and that killing is foremost among these rituals. Rather than undermine civilization, war-and-death, functions to consolidate its fundamental limits.