Fighting for Real: Truth and American War Memory

Abstract

This essay-review considers two recent books on the subject of American veteran memoir—Stephen Cushman’s The General’s Civil War (2021) and Myra Mendible’s American War Stories (2021). Surveying military conflicts centered on the US Civil War and the more recent wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan, both authors examine a range of veteran nonfiction writing, and with the explicit purpose of speaking to US audiences in our own time. Given the United States’ severely divided political culture today, both authors see the lessons and hard truths expressed in veteran memoir as rife with possibilities for addressing American social divisions in the twenty-first century. Along the way, a preoccupation with the very themes of “truth” and “reality” exposed by war representation leads both authors, though for very different reasons, to meditate on the need for new epistemological frameworks that, given the limitations of a waning postmodernism, would restore a fresh commitment to both. While very different philosophies of history shape the perspectives of each author, the revivified commitment to truth-telling unites their accounts.[A] . . . central theme . . . in . . . US military history and the literary portrayal of war is the renewed commitment to historical veracity, expanded factuality, and representational depth—in short, a fuller, more capacious picture of both the truth and reality of war-making.