Soldiers Once and Still by Alex Vernon.

Summary

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According to Alex Vernon, author of Soldiers Once and Still, the American literary war experience has been shaped by Ernest Hemingway, and the literary style embodied by Hemingway (heroic male and thwarted love) has continued largely uninterrupted for almost a century. In essence, For Whom The Bell Tolls did more than tell a simple war/love story; rather, it set a tone and locked in several generations of American fiction writers. In Vernon's view, Hemingway's hold is only now beginning to be pried from [John Wayne]'s hands at the beginning of the 21st century by a new stable of male American novelists who are challenging older narratives and developing more complex thematics in which the starkly apparent black/white dimensions are less clear. Vernon writes, "Reexamining America's war literature of the last century thus seems critical at this time in the nation's history. Each new generation must study the human dimension of war in order to understand war better when it beckons" (p. ix).

Soldiers Once and Still is a demanding book. This is not a volume for the ill-read amateur. Vernon demands much of his readers as he explores several generations of 20th-century military fiction writers. Concentrating on three stalwarts of the genre (Ernest Hemingway, James Salter, and Tim O'Brien), the author charts a detailed course through a literary minefield. The objective of Vernon's study is not what might be termed traditional war literature (that is, narratives of war); rather, the author examines the general topic of war and, more specifically, the individual in combat through the eyes of three writers who, each in his own right, were combat veterans who experienced war in their youth as a central narrative within their own human development.

Moreover, writes Vernon, "War profoundly affects all participants, altering their sense of themselves and the narratives by which they define their identities, including their gender constructs. Veterans must also come to terms with the society that sent them to war. Like anything else, war does not affect everyone it touches in the same ways. The homoerotic dimension of Ernest Hemingway's fiction...registers only slightly in James Slater's work and registers not at all in Tim O'Brien's. O'Brien's male characters...share with Hemingway's male characters feelings of betrayal by women and some resentment toward them" (p. 259).

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Extract

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Soldiers Once and Still by Alex Vernon.

Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004, xi + 314 pp.

Idlers and cowards are here at home now,

But the youth I love is gone to war, far hence.

Weary, lonely, for me he longs. (Anonymous Kiowa Wind Song)

Those of us of a certain age may well remember the 1950 classic war drama, The Sands of Iowa Jima, starring John Wayne and featuring a hardened career marine who rises above hi...

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