My War: Killing Time in Iraq Colby Buzzell. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2005
My War: Killing Time in Iraq Colby Buzzell. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2005. 336 pp. $25.95 hardcover. Reviewed by Matthew Hill, University of Maryland, College Park Since the Great War, the memoir has become one of the most prominent genres in the literature of modern warfare. Non-fictional remembrances of the gruesome realities and cultural upheaval caused by war such as Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War, Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, and Robert Graves’ Good-Bye To All That were, as Paul Fussell points out in The Great War and Modern Memory, at the center of literary production on the war, revealing the horrors of combat to a largely ignorant reading public. Memoirs, in this sense, serve often as “secret histories” of conflicts, offering a counterpoint to sterilized, politicized, “official” representations of warfare, representations often awash in terms such as “glory” and “honor” and “patriotism.” Michael Herr’s memoir of his experiences as a journalist during the American war in Viet Nam, Dispatches, seeks self-consciously to write a counter narrative of the conflict, penetrating the rigid constructs of the “straight” history put forth by politicians, generals, even mapmakers. He writes in the book’s opening pages of an old French map hanging on the wall of his Saigon apartment: If dead ground could come back and haunt you the way dead people do, they’d have been able to mark my map CURRENT and burn the ones they’d been using since ‘64, but count on it, nothing like that was going to happen.
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