Some essential reading on military experience and culture.

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This week I’m doing something a little different: rather than expound on some topic which “grinds my gears” because it gets the military experience wrong, I’m going to point you toward places that get it right. Specifically, I’m going to list some of my favourite books which deal with the reality of military experience and culture. I figure it might come in handy for some of you as we slowly home in on the holiday season: either as a guide to shop for the military aficionado in your life, or, if you are that person, a not-too-subtle link you can share with friends and family.

This list is by no means exhaustive: it’s just a smattering of books on my shelf or in my Audible or Kindle or public library which really hit the nail on the head when it comes to some aspect of military life. Please feel free to add more in the comments below, as always, especially if I’ve missed something. And if you haven’t already, please subscribe using the link below, and share this post with like-minded military nerds enthusiasts.

If you enjoy this blog and want to support it, please consider a donation. Keeping this blog going doesn’t cost much, but it isn’t free either, so any help would be very much appreciated👍

Although I’m talking about books today, I could not write this post without reference to The Onion‘s excellent preview of “the most realistic videogame about war”:

This post links to a permanent page where I’ll be putting up similar lists, not just about military experience and culture, but also military history, military technology, and maybe some other categories in due course. I know that there’s a lot of overlap on the Venn diagrams of “military culture” and “military history”, among others, so I’ll just pick a category for each book to avoid repetition. By military “culture”, I mean the set(s) of norms, shared understandings, and beliefs which hold in a given unit, army, crew, or any other military group. Military “experience” is fairly self-explanatory, I hope: it’s the day-to-day things as well as (or more so than) the big, scary, exciting stuff.

Catch-22 (Joseph Heller )

In one sentence: This World War 2 novel illustrates the true savagery of an uncaring, impersonal military, and suggests that individual rebellion is the only way out.

I couldn’t leave out my all-time favourite novel, especially because it does really encapsulate military culture. Set on a remote Italian island during the Second World War, Catch-22 follows Yossarian, a bombardier¹ with the United States Army Air Force. Yossarian is not your typical military hero: he spends the whole book trying his best to get out of flying more combat missions, because he is scared to death every time he gets into a plane. His struggles are not with the Germans, per se, but with the individuals and collective bureaucratic machinery of war which, as he sees it, is out to get him.

The novel draws on the author’s own experiences during WW2, and is an interesting example of a time and culture (the early 1940s and war) seen and told through a lens that would only come later (the late 1950s and 1960s, postmodernism, and growing disillusionment with the military-industrial complex). In this sense it’s anachronistic, but it still hits so many aspects of military life on the head:

• The antihero trying to shirk his duty. Real-life militaries are full of people trying to avoid doing hard things. And, I’m sorry to say, you would probably be the same if you were serving, to at least some extent. Everyone does it. “Going sick”, as Yossarian does a lot in this book, is one sure-fire way to get out of a duty, a tough exercise, or even an unwanted overseas deployment.
• The absurd situations created by intransigent military bureaucracy. Two examples in Catch-22 stand out, but there are many. Both are deeply tragic as well as hilarious. There’s the “dead man in Yossarian’s tent”, an airman who reports to the squadron, drops his bags in his shared tent with Yossarian, tries to find the orderly room² but wanders into the operations room by mistake, is assigned to a crew, and dies on the mission. Because he hasn’t been to the orderly room, he hasn’t “officially” reported for duty to the squadron, so he doesn’t exist on their records. But because he doesn’t exist, no-one can take responsibility for his possessions, so the bags remain, a ghostly reminder of the “dead man”. Then there’s the squadron’s doctor, who is mortally afraid of flying, but gets a friendly pilot to put his name down on the manifest for each flight so that he can earn his flight pay. When this pilot’s plane crashes, and the doctor isn’t seen parachuting out, he is recorded as having died in the crash, even though he’s physically right there and witnessing the crash along with everyone else. He becomes an outcast as he is deleted bit-by-bit from every official record. Even his wife slowly comes to accept his death, despite his letters to her to the contrary (the many widow’s pensions and allowances help her to come to terms with this fact).
• The selfishness and uncaring incompetence of senior officers. I’m not going to go on an anti-senior officer rant here. I’ve had the privilege of serving under some amazing officers in my time (as well as some bad ones, of course). But what Catch-22 really gets, through its exaggerated characters like Colonel Cathcart and General Peckem, is how senior officers are just as human as anyone else, and driven by the same desires for power and personal advancement. In some cases, this can result in the type of character depicted in the book: someone who cares only for their own advancement and can only think in terms of their placing relative to peers in the military organisation.
• The recreation. The characters in Catch-22 have lots of idle time: swimming on the beach, drinking in the Officers’ Club, flirting with the nurses, even shooting skeet. This will ring true for anyone who’s ever served at home or overseas: a surprising amount of personal time and official effort goes into “welfare” activities to keep soldiers’ morale up. A related point is the character of Milo Minderbinder, the ambitious mess officer who sets up an international trade network but ensures that the mess always has the best food. Good food is the most important contributor to morale, so an officers like Milo would be a genuine asset to any unit³

Catch-22 is not for everyone: the author’s values, especially toward women, are not in keeping with modern mores. The biggest challenge, however, is the non-linear nature of the narrative. This story jumps around a lot. It all makes sense by the end, but woe betide you if you’re halfway through and trying to figure out what’s happened and when. Don’t even bother: just let the narrative carry you along, and trust that all will be well in the end. It’s more than worth it, and the narrative chaos gets more and more enjoyable with every subsequent read. Having said that, I would understand if someone told me they couldn’t get through it, for this reason. There’s a 1970 film which is half-decent, although lots of the best parts are necessarily left out. There’s also a 2019 mini-series, which I got about half-way through. It was okay, but I realised at that stage that the filmmakers actually didn’t get the humour of the book: they managed to reproduce some of the classic dialogue and scenes, but somehow devoid of the humour. Maybe I’m being too harsh—let me know in the comments if you liked it a lot.

Heller writes two characters who embody proper military and patriotic ideals: Clevinger (he of court-martial fame, above), and Nately. Spoiler: both characters die. They both serve as foils to Yossarian at various stages of the book, giving Heller a chance to really have fun with his nihilistic, anti-authoritarian message. This makes for a fun read, but it also rings true: the army is the place where I’ve had the most revealing, enlightening, and amusing debates and arguments about what it means to be a soldier, to do one’s duty, and to serve a greater cause while also serving individuals who can be extremely flawed human beings.

Catch-22 illustrates the cold and impersonal machinery of death that a modern military force must become. It also questions the deepest axiom of military service: that you must put yourself in harm’s way for the sake of your comrades and the flag. Yossarian rejects this axiom. If everyone was like Yossarian, then militaries would not be able to function. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that would be a good thing or not. But, in the words of the book:

[Yossarian:] “From now on I’m thinking only of me.”

Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: “But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way?”

“Then,” said Yossarian, “I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?”

Flashman (George McDonald Fraser)

In one sentence: A cruel, cowardly, Casanova, Flashman always ends up in deep trouble, and always comes out smelling of roses.

This recommendation is actually for the series of books, of which Flashman is the first, but not at all a bad one to start with. The author presents these books as “The Flashman Papers”, unpublished memoirs of a famous Victorian-era military man supposedly found during an estate auction. The titular hero is a villain from another novel, Tom Brown’s School Days, by Thomas Hughes. Fraser took the character and developed him over a dozen or so adventures at such military milestones as Balaclava (the charge of the light brigade), Afghanistan, the American Civil War, the Opium Wars, and Custer’s Last Stand. In each situation, the antihero “General Sir Harry Paget Flashman VC, KCB, KCIE” does his level best to avoid physical danger while trying to portray himself in the most flattering light. He invariably succeeds, usually by dumb luck, in coming out of the most terrifying situations looking brave, and enjoys quite a standing in society (and much success with many, many women) as a result.

I’m including this book not because it’s a realistic account of military life (if a typical military career involved that much sex, no army in the world would have a recruitment problem), but because the character Flashman shows up a conflict which many military folks grapple with (albeit to a much lesser extent than with Flashman): the need to be seen to do one’s duty while also trying to avoid hard, uncomfortable, or dangerous work. The fact that Flashman comes out of so many of these engagements looking well is not just down to good luck, of course. We see plenty of brave characters, “fools” in Flashman’s reckoning, come a cropper while good old Flashy comes through. His attributes, at least his laziness and competence, remind me of a categorisation attributed to the Prussians and/or the Germans:

I do not know whether your Lordships are familiar with the saying of a German General that there are four types of officer but I think that it is relevant to what we are discussing. He said that there are four types of officer: the clever and lazy, the clever and industrious, the stupid and lazy, and the stupid and industrious.

The clever and lazy you make Chief of Staff, because he will not try to do everybody else’s work, and will always have time to think. The clever and industrious you make his deputy. The stupid and lazy you put into a line battalion, and kick him into doing a job of work. The stupid and industrious you must get rid of at once, because he is a national danger.

—Viscount Swinton, House of Lords (1942)

This categorisation is even available in a handy matrix form:

What some non-military folk are sometimes surprised at is how the smart but lazy officer (i.e., the Flashmen of the world) ought to be commanders, whereas the smart and industrious should be staff officers. This is no surprise to anyone who has served, however. We all like to serve under a commander who is, on average, as lazy as we are. He or she will not put the unit to work unnecessarily, and will always think of the simplest, easiest way to get a job done. Let Flashman be your inspiration, and enjoy the ride over 12 books, 50+ years, and lucky escape beyond measure.

The Forever War (Joe Haldeman)

In one sentence: An interstellar soldier gets increasingly alienated from the human race he fights to protect from aliens, until fighting is the only life he knows.

Why am I including a science fiction novel in a list of books about military culture and experience? Because, like many science fiction stories, it actually reads across very closely to real-life military experiences. The author served in Vietnam, and many aspects of his fictional war against the alien Taurans serve as metaphors for that conflict.

I’m less interested in the metaphors (although they are part of what makes this a classic) and more interested in what the book tells us about everyday military life. And a big part of this is the sense of alienation and disconnection from the civilian world which the protagonist William Mandella and his fellow veterans feel, despite putting their lives on the line for these same civilians. In the book this is exacerbated by the near-lightspeed⁴ travel that Mandella undergoes to reach the enemy and fight them.

This is an exaggerated depiction of a very real effect which soldiers, sailors, and aircrew experience when they deploy on operations. Of course there’s no relativistic time dilation, but there is a strange sensation of time passing as normal for everyone back home while you are stuck in a seemingly perpetual loop of operational routine.

Haldeman also accurately describes the feeling of veterans returning home to a culture whose values seem very different. Of course, coming from any all-military environment back into “civvy street” will be an adjustment, with different values and ideologies holding sway. What’s especially jarring for the military man or woman is when the values of home clash with the dearly held values of military life.

The Forever War takes the real-world difficulties which soldiers face and, through an exaggerated science fiction setting, shows us how these affect the men and women who fight. It’s also a rollicking good read.

On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (Norman Davies)

In one sentence: Military history is full of disasters caused by incompetent generals, but military culture fosters and can even reward this incompetence.

This is a book whose title really does say it all. OTPOMI, as I’m calling it here for brevity, should be mandatory reading for all military folk. I got a present of this book just before starting my military career, and have re-read it since with the benefit of a bit more experience of military life. It’s an alarming read which would leave a lay reader shaking their head in wonder that such specimens of foolishness could ever be trusted to lead men.

For the military man or woman, however, reading this will have them nodding along in agreement and recognition. Like I said before, it’s not that the military is full of buffoons and halfwits, but it reflects society at large, which unfortunately already has a fair share of buffoons and halfwits. The pernicious thing about military life is that it can (not always, but it can) provide the ideal conditions for such people to succeed. This is because of the authoritarian and rigid nature of military hierarchies, which can punish creativity.

OTPOMI analyses this phenomenon in two parts: the first half of the book is a collection of case studies. These will leave you shaking your head in disbelief at the increasing levels of incompetence and the horrendous human consequences of same. For each case study, Davies analyses the psychological factors which underpinned the commander in question’s decisions (or lack thereof). In the second half of the book, he draws together the common threads from the case studies and addresses the psychological root causes of these disasters.

Davies puts quite a lot of emphasis on “bullshit”, the unforgiving focus on small details which can act as a dangerous substitute for real quality and capability. He gives the example of a ship whose iron plates are rusty and who is barely seaworthy, but has a fresh coat of paint and gleaming brasses.

Anyone who’s ever been up all night preparing for a general or minister’s inspection while the unit is falling asunder will recognise this problem: it pervades every aspect of military life to some extent or other, and is inversely proportional to the quality and capability of the unit.

August 1914 (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)

In one sentence: Two Russian armies are defeated by one German in East Prussia, and it’s all due to incompetence, intransigence, and bad communications between generals.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is most famous for his books on the Soviet-era gulag prison camps (The Gulag Archipelago and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), and these are amazing books in their own right. August 1914, however, is a fictionalised account of the Battle of Tannenberg in what was then East Prussia at the outbreak of the First World War. It’s a strange book, with some mostly disconnected early chapters concerning several Russian families, and a few chapters written like a screenplay. It also (at least in my version) has two chapters completely redacted. These are, I understand, about Vladimir Lenin, who was of course brewing up trouble for the Russian Empire at this time too. The Lenin chapters fell foul of the Soviet censors, even in their post-Stalinist era of greater transparency.

I include this book here not because of its political message (which is interwoven, but is pretty superficial) but because it’s a grimly accurate account of the difficulties involved in moving, co-ordinating, and communicating with many different and scattered manoeuvre elements on a gigantic battlefield.

The reader can’t help but feel particularly bad for General Samsonov, the army commander, who is stuck impotently in his headquarters, surrounded by mediocre staff officers and an observer British general whom he must entertain, as protocol demands. He wants to effect his own plans for his army, but the Army Group HQ, the next higher rung, sends him detailed but nonsensical orders micromanaging his own corps and divisions⁵. At the same time, he is getting delayed, incomplete, and contradictory reports from his own formations in the field, so he doesn’t even know exactly where his army is, let alone where the Germans are. Eventually, in desperation, he gets on his horse and rides up closer to the front line, an urge that every army officer has had at every level of command. It’s a bad idea, like it usually is in real life too. At the front, you feel like you’re in more control, but you’re really just getting under the skin of the subordinate commander who’s in charge there, while neglecting completely the other parts of your command. We’ve all been there.

Meanwhile, for the troops on the front lines, who also get their own chapters, the campaign is a farce. They get up before dawn to spend an age assembling for a march, they then wait hours for order on where to go, they finally get going and march until dusk, only to be told the next morning that they need to go back exactly where they had left from. This phenomenon of “hurry up and wait”, along with pointless movement, will be familiar to anyone who’s ever worn a uniform—we’ll also see more of this in the Sword of Honour series below and the endless “flaps”.

The politics of life at headquarters will also ring true to readers who have spent time in or around the higher echelons. Generals carefully craft their orders to their subordinates, making them just about clear enough that they will be acted upon, while leaving enough ambiguity that the general can always claim, after the defeat, that he meant something completely different. They do something similar in their reports up the line, amplifying the smallest successes and minimising the setbacks so that no-one is really sure what’s going on until the entire army has been surrounded and the battle well and truly lost. There are eerie parallels here between the Imperial Russian Army of 1914 and Putin’s Russian Army today: you should check out Perun on YouTube and his video on How Lies Destroy Armies (it’s a long one, but worth it. Skip to 28:35 for an example of this concept in action).

War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)

In one sentence: A gaggle of Russian aristocrats’ lives are forever changed by the war against Napoleon, and they all have about seventeen names each.

This is a classic, and yes, I do feel a bit pretentious putting it here, but it’s honestly a great book: an actual page-turner, once you get over the aforementioned many names per character. There are plenty of reasons to read this book, but what stands out for me, and the reason I include it here, is the scene where Pierre⁶ is in captivity during Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. The aristocrat is reduced to eating frozen horseflesh to stay alive. He reflects on the relativity of suffering and happiness: that’s it’s possible to be far happier with a very small amount in very desperate conditions than it is to have many material goods and comfort. This revelation goes on to change his life and bring him great success and happiness.

This idea of the smallest mercies and comforts bringing great joy will, of course, be familiar to any soldier who’s had the unique pleasure of spending a lot of time under the wind, rain, and stars:

And finally, since we mentioned Putin’s Russia above, we have to remind ourselves of the new name for this great work of literature:

The Sword of Honour Trilogy (Evelyn Waugh)

In one sentence: And old English gentleman tries to serve his country and is foiled along the way by the very system he thinks he serves.

The Sword of Honour trilogy: Men At Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender, are among the most realistic depictions of military life that you can find. The protagonist, Guy Crouchback is a middle-aged English aristocrat, scion of a declining but once-powerful Catholic dynasty. Coming from a failed marriage immediately at the outbreak of war, he drifts into the Army as a way to do his duty, as he sees it.

Although there is some action in the trilogy, it doesn’t dominate. This is quite realistic: most of the narrative of the trilogy is spent in training, forming up, rehearsing, preparing to deploy, and ultimately not deploying. The unit spends much of its time in a “flap”: a state of agitated and urgent activity, usually involving a hasty move to a secret location by train. The location in question is invariably another grim training camp in a remote and miserable part of Britain, and the “flap” (as all flaps always turn out to be) was a pointless waste of energy and effort, because the unit is going nowhere. It’s the same “hurry up and wait” we discussed above.

In a similar way to Catch-22 above, Guy Crouchback finds that the real “enemy” are not the Germans, but the cold and heartless bureaucrats, ambitious schemers, and useless administrators of the Army, who contrive to fill his life with pointless discomfort without seeming to serve any purpose in the grand scheme of things. The difference from Catch-22, and the reason it’s more realistic (in my opinion), is that Guy Crouchback also encounters kind and helpful people along the way. Ultimately, whereas Catch-22 is a nihilistic story about the futility of individual action in a global war, Sword of Honour portrays the pointlessness and absurdity honestly, but also shows us the small but still important differences that one man can make to the overall cause. It still does him no good, however, and this points to another realistic lesson about military experience: it doesn’t make you a better person.

Conclusion

That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoyed the recommendations, and I hope you find some inspiration for your next book or audiobook. Please let me know in the comments if I’ve missed a classic that you think really encapsulates military life. Better still, if you have a book and you’re not sure if its depiction of army life is faithful or not, ask me in the comments. As always, if you like what you’ve read, please share it with like-minded folks, and make sure you subscribe. Thanks for reading!

Featured Image: Generated by Chat-GPT⁷, Android app v.1.2024.282

1. Bombardiers sit in the nose of bomber planes and decide when to release the payload of bombs onto the target. ↩︎
2. This is military-speak for “administration office.” ↩︎
3. SPOILER: Except, of course, for the part where he bombs his own base as part of a lucrative deal with the Germans. ↩︎
4. “Relativistic” is the term used in this, and in many other science fiction books, for travel close to the speed of light. To massively simplify Einstein’s theories of relativity, the basic idea is this: the closer to light you travel, the slower time passes for you and the quicker time passes for everyone else (although it seems perfectly normal to you). So, if you travel a long long way at near-light speed for what feels like a few weeks, fight some aliens, and then make the same journey back, you might have experienced a month or so of time passing, but years or even centuries might have passed at home. The effect increases the closer to light speed you get. ↩︎
5. A quick reminder/lesson in military organisation, from big to small: Army Group > Army > Corps > Division > Brigade > [Regiment] > Battalion > Company > Platoon > Section ↩︎
6. Count Pyotr “Pierre” Kirillovich Bezukhov: see what I mean about the many names? Tolstoy doesn’t just stick to one throughout, he uses them interchangeably throughout. And he does this. With all the main characters (about a dozen in all). ↩︎
7. Prompt 1: Can you please generate a picture for me? It should be a line drawing style picture of a soldier in world war 1 era uniform reading a book in a dugout or trench.
   Prompt 2: This is excellent! Can you make the image wide for a banner format, and embellish it with shells bursting above the trench on the left and right. ↩︎