A soldier remembers

Paul FUSSELL’S short powerful book of linked essays about ground fighting in the European theater of World War II should be mandatory reading for future military leaders at West Point. The unbearable fear, systemic screw-ups and mangled corpses that are the daily ration of any infantry combat soldier are so vividly and personally drawn that it might give pause to any glory-lovers among the cadets who dream of conquest without blood.

Part of war’s reality, Fussell argues, is the necessity of governments to lie about it and to sugarcoat the lies with military PR implying that war is really good for you.

Fussell, a professor of English literature and a former combat GI, understands that there is a direct connection between misuse of words and dead soldiers. He is repelled by war films such as “Saving Private Ryan” (except for its opening D-day assault footage) and even Sam Fuller’s unromanticized “The Big Red One.” Sanitizing euphemisms such as “precision bombing” and “surgical strike” nauseate him. Anything that blurs or detracts from the ugly reality of oozing intestines, bloated headless corpses, the stench of rotting bodies so strong that it made pilots of artillery-spotter planes high above the battlefield vomit is a criminal fraud, Fussell insists.

Pasadena-born Fussell, author of the classic study of the literature of World War I (“The Great War and Modern Memory”), is an authority on 18th century poetry. Obsessively, however, he has devoted his adult life to understanding battle from a dogface’s point of view. At a 60-year distance from his wartime trauma, he is suffused with a tragic irony he regards as the only conceivable “grown-up vision” of war. (“The Boys’ Crusade” is dedicated: “To those who suffered on both sides.”)

As a 20-year-old infantry lieutenant, Fussell was “ill treated by members of the German Wehrmacht” and badly wounded in France in 1945, leaving him 40% disabled. He paints himself as an earnest California preppy warped by battle into a desensitized, agile killer, chronically frightened and loyal only to his immediate platoon. It will strike any ex-military person as honest. His love, accompanied by a certain high-literary condescension, is for the “inadequately trained and largely unwilling” boys of his title -- the hyper-scared teenage infantry replacements ground up like hamburger in the European theater’s mixture of terror, technology and incompetence. I was one of those infantry replacements, saved from almost certain death by the accident of a slightly later birth date and the incredible courage of boy-men like Fussell and his F Company, 410th Infantry, 103rd Division, who fought in the heaviest combat.

The “black fury” that flowed over Fussell when a Nazi 88-millimeter shell tore through him and he learned his squad members were dead has never left him. He speaks hauntingly of men driven insane by battle, citing Audie Murphy, World War II’s most decorated GI, who, when asked how combat soldiers survive a war, said sadly, “I don’t think they ever do.” It’s a miracle of productive anger that Fussell endured with his sanity and memory intact.

Even today, Fussell writes, after Vietnam and the desert wars, “the struggle in France and Germany in 1944 and 1945 seems to remain the army’s point of reference for its conception of war.” The European ground war is also the author’s core passion. Again and again, in this and other books, including “Doing Battle” and “Wartime,” he revisits the experience of his rifle platoon on a certain cold day in March ’45. Was his fear-fogged hesitation to cross the zeroed-in road responsible for the death of his subordinate, Sgt. Edward K. Hudson?

Fussell still suffers lingering survivor guilt laced with an ordinary rifleman’s rage -- not at the Germans but first and foremost at his officers; the U.S. government propagandists; the furiously unwelcoming French who resented being slaughtered by deliberately imprecise Allied bombing raids, and any form of patriotic coercion. In “The Boys’ Crusade” he has given us the most eloquent meditation on war I have read since the World War I poets Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden.

The guts -- the word is apt -- of Fussell’s slim volume are his chapters on gruesome Allied army “mistakes” resulting from preposterous orders issued by high-ranking rear echelon generals blithely detached from the muddy realities of front-line riflemen. He cites the infamous “Operation Cobra,” in which Gen. Omar N. Bradley ordered saturation aerial bombing of Nazi-defended French hedgerows and managed only to kill hundreds of GIs; the unnecessary slaughter of Allied troops and French civilians at the Falaise Gap caused by staff incompetence; the hushed-up Great Slapton Sands disaster, when blunders caused 749 U.S. seaborne casualties whose bodies were secretly bulldozed into a mass grave; and the mismanaged Hurtgen Forest campaign, when U.S. Gen. Courtney Hodges kept hurling ill-trained, outgunned teenage GIs against hardened SS troops long after it was obvious to the stupidest corporal that the strategy was imbecilic.

“This book is not intended as a pacifist text,” Fussell explains. He’s right. It’s too human and full of contradictions for that. Although he clearly loathes rear-echelon strategists with their maps and pins who have no sense of the human cost of the “soldierly encounter,” like many GIs (including me), he admires the humanity of the supreme Allied commander Gen. Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower. He even has mixed feelings about Gen. George S. Patton, whom he regards at one level as an egomaniacal butcher but also as one of the few combat leaders who went up front with his troops and knew what it was like to dig a foxhole in the snow and how fatal it was to burrow underground during a tree-burst shelling. “Plans should be made by those who are going to execute them,” Fussell approvingly quotes Patton. Rumsfeld & Co.: Please copy.

It would dishonor the intent of his book to read it as a stone to throw at the Bush administration’s Iraq war policy. His depth of feeling and urgency of experience are too authentic for a cheap linkage. And surprisingly, at the very end, when describing ordinary GIs’ shocked, angry reaction to the discovery of the Nazi death and slave labor camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald, Fussell concludes on a patriotic note totally absent from the rest of this terrifying book.

At war’s end “the troops knew more about the enemy than they had known when, early on, they had sneered or giggled at [Eisenhower’s] word, crusade .... They had been fighting and suffering for the sacredness of life itself.... The boys’ explosive little tour in France had been a crusade after all.”

Reading Fussell after a diet of CNN, Fox News and even National Public Radio’s mellifluous dispatches from Iraq is like waking up from a Disney dream of war, at first shocking but ultimately bracing. *