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Throughout this century, military combat has called forth some of our most frightening narratives. Recent events in Kosovo and elsewhere have drawn our attention afresh to the problems associated with arms control and have added urgency to debates about how conflicts can be solved without recourse to war. One of the chief assumptions in these debates is that war is (and should be) an unmitigated horror for all participants. Only the evil "other", the enemy, is said to be actually enjoying the bloodshed. The men and women on "our side" are portrayed as engaged in warfare for righteous motives and even then reluctantly. "Our" history books and political narratives are saturated with bloody images of torn, putrid flesh. Emphasis is placed on the physical agony, psychological trauma and often senseless destruction that accompany armed conflict.
Within this gory articulation of war as experienced by British, American and Australian service personnel (the nationalities I will focus on in this article) there are two stories - both fundamental to battle and both passionately narrated by combat soldiers which commentators have tended to shy away from. The first is this: we know so much about how "our men" died for their country, yet barely anything about how they killed for it. One of the aims of my recent book, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare, is to put killing back into military history. The second feature that is scarcely ever mentioned involves acknowledging that many British, American and Australian combatants during the two world wars and the Vietnam War found that the act of killing another person in warfare could be extremely pleasurable.
This is not to deny the obvious fact that many acts of warfare were either terrifying or, more frequently, demeaning, frustrating and disorientating. Even for combatants (and only one in eight servicemen during the First World War actually experienced battle) most of the war was spent behind the lines carrying out menial chores. When in the front lines, life was ugly and frightening. Combatants quickly discovered that the threat of physical devastation could only be endured through stoicism, by shortening perceptions of time and resolutely trying to ignore the threatening environment. The First World War soldier, William Clark, in...