Antiwar battles on two fronts

Michael Moore movies are less about industrial cities on the skids (“Roger and Me”) or guns (“Bowling for Columbine”) or the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and Iraq war (“Fahrenheit 9/11”) than they are about Moore’s reactions to those events. His new book, “Will They Ever Trust Us Again?,” is more Moore.

Subtitled “Letters From the War Zone,” the book’s real theme is helpfully spelled out on the jacket: “Soldiers in Iraq -- and their families back home -- write to Michael Moore.” Thus we have an anonymous soldier thanking Moore “for expressing your freedom of speech!” Two pages later we find a soldier just returned from 11 months in Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division adding his thanks and telling Moore, “You do not have to wear a uniform to serve your country, and you have proved that time and time again.”

The troops who e-mail Moore sometimes admit that his fans in the military are very much the minority. The writers rail against the war, the president, the military: the usual gripes in combat. Only occasionally does real passion show, as in the section titled “Letters From Veterans (of Past Wars),” in which a writer who says he spent 25 years as an infantry drill instructor in the Army Reserve wonders how many soldiers he trained for combat have been killed or wounded in Iraq. Also moving are the thoughts of a mother worried about a son headed for Iraq and the anger of a Maine college teacher who hears on the radio of the death of a former student. But too much of the book is repetitious, with complaints about the war setting up praise for a book or film by Moore -- whose 2003 Oscar acceptance speech for “Bowling for Columbine” is reprinted as the introduction for readers who might have missed it.

For the reality of war and what it does to those we send to fight, there’s “Purple Hearts: Back From Iraq,” a wonderful but wrenching book featuring pictures and interviews by Nina Berman. We read each day of soldiers killed and wounded by rocket-propelled grenades, suicide car bombers, mines and the deadly weapons known as “improvised explosive devices.” Berman’s pictures and the words of those maimed in attacks give graphic testimony to just what that means.

A soldier ordered to demolish a mural of Saddam Hussein by hitting it with his tank has the wall fall on him, breaking his neck and rendering him a quadriplegic. “I’m just happy I took the wall down. No regrets. I did my job,” Spc. Luis Calderon says. A private first class in a Humvee delivering ice to other soldiers hits a land mine. It blows off both legs, burns his face and breaks an arm in six places. “The reasons for going to war were bogus, but we were right to go in there. Saddam was a bad guy,” Alan Jermaine Lewis says.

Berman’s pictures show the soldiers at home after their discharges, or in Army hospitals, undergoing rehabilitation. A combat engineer wounded by a bomb blast lost his left leg below the knee and his eyesight, which he hopes will return someday. He does not know where his siblings are; his relationships with his parents are “kind of complicated.” Berman photographed him in the woods near the trailer where he lives alone in a Pennsylvania township. He claims to have no regrets, but his boasts of jumping out of airplanes and playing with mines ring hollow and foretell a difficult future.

Moore and Berman share a concern for the soldiers. Moore’s correspondents thank him for concentrating his venom on the country’s civilian leaders and not the troops. Berman’s photographs of the wounded with their deep burns, sightless eyes and artificial limbs and her willingness to let them tell their stories without interruption demonstrate empathy for her subjects. Hers is the more truly antiwar book, even with the soldiers’ expressions of belief in their mission and their devotion to the Army and fellow soldiers who shared their training, combat, wounds and grief.

Historian Paul Fussell, wounded in World War II, has stripped away romantic overtones of combat in his books. In “The Boys’ Crusade,” he decried depictions of GIs that belong to “the history of sentimental show business” rather than to truthful portrayals of real emotion. Berman’s book lets 19 men and one woman in various stages of suffering share their physical and psychological wounds, giving us a truthful portrait of the havoc wreaked by war.

*

John Needham is a Times editorial writer