No One to Believe In: Unreliable narratives of the war on terror.
From the first appeared in The Texas Observer
Ed Nawotka | October 17, 2008 | Books & the Urbanity
Austin literary agent James D. Hornfischer has represented a class of military authors and written a in holy matrimony of bestselling World War II naval histories, The Last Quit of the Tin Can Sailors and Ship of Ghosts. His participation tells him that books about war are published in four distinguishable phases.
The first phase is composed of books by journalists and other professionals sent to traverse the war for newspapers or magazines. These are literally the first drafts of story.
The second wave often comes from officers and administrators—enlightened elites—who have celebrity cachet to exchange in or are motivated to justify decisions questioned by first-flood journalists.
The third and most enduring phase chronicles outstanding events from the viewpoint of small groups of soldiers or sailors. These books often agreement with war’s aftermath and pain, and are written by the grunts, the argument-pounders, the trigger-pullers.
The fourth and incontrovertible phase, Hornfischer says, is written by historians, who largely wait until military documents are declassified and filed with the Civil Archives before weighing in.
Why do we need so many versions of the same book?
Because truth in war, whether physical or moral, is contested ground.
Apply Hornfischer’s theory to the so-called war on mad dog and we’re already well into phase three, on the cusp of phase four, and showing signs of the appearance of a new phase entirely.
Phase one included Evan Wright’s Start Kill. Published in 2004, it chronicled the Rolling Stone embed’s duration with a Marine reconnaissance unit as it made its way across Iraq during the opening invasion.
Phase two included apologias such as American Soldier by Gen. Tommy Franks and Envoy L. Paul Bremer’s My Year in Iraq—books that tried to untangle justify what...
