Intimate History of Killing

by Joanna Bourke

Book Overview

The characteristic act of men at war is not dying, but killing. Politicians and military historians may gloss over human slaughter, emphasizing the defense of national honor, but for men in active... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465007376
• ISBN13: 9780465007370
• Release Date: September 1999
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 2.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.7" x 6.6" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Insightful and thought-provoking (despite unfair criticisms)

Bourke has written an intriguing and wonderful book which asks difficult questions and demands that we confront uncomfortable truths. This flies in the face of the Stephen Ambrose groupies who want glorious bands of brothers who grit their teeth and buckle down to unpleasant chores. Rather Bourke, a tremendously erudite historian, shows the complexity of the reaction of Western soldiers to killing. Like Klaus Theweleit's MALE FANTASIES and Christopher Browning's ORDINARY MEN, Bourke's book must be taken seriously and forces any thoughtful reader to question their own possible reaction in extraordinary circumstances. This self-analysis is automatic when reading this work and undobtedly, many people don't want their neat fantasies disturbed by inconvenient reality.

A fascinating book (contains grisly details)

The bibliography and list of sources for this book form a hefty chunk of it, and in the acknowledgments Joanna Bourke thanks somebody (presumably a Life Partner) for being at her side while she waded through all the source material.I'd think she would need it. This is a grisly, enormously detailed attempt to suggest that, contrary to the usual liberal dogma, the primary experience of war is not that of dying but of killing. Killing, Bourke says, is what combat soldiers go into battle for, and she has accumulated a heap of evidence to prove it. Not just endless pamphlets on the importance of bayonet practice (the British Army took the bayonet a bit too seriously until well into the second world war, despite the great unlikelihood that a soldier would ever get to use it) but also bloodthirsty padres exchanging dog collars for rifles, nicely-brought-up English girls fighting with Serbs in the front line during WW1, and numerous first-hand accounts of the pleasure many men (and women) associated with killing. Contrary to what Mr. Thurston says below (think he was reading a different book), Bourke presents this information with the coolness of a proper historian. She wades stoically through accounts of US soldiers in Vietnam desecrating Viet Cong corpses and doesn't scruple to let William Calley provide his own justification for the My Lai massacre (feeble though it is). The My Lai story focuses many of the issues in the book. Calley and his men had been indoctrinated by their superiors to the point where they seriously believed that Vietnamese babies could set off grenades by means of strings tied round their little fingers. They went into the village in a frame of mind that had been trained to deny the existence of the concept of the non-combatant. They massacred hundreds of unarmed civilians. Calley's excuse was that they weren't doing anything they hadn't been told to do. This was true in terms of the kind of briefings they were having, but untrue in terms of the official rules of combat that prevailed at the time. (Bourke breaks cover and passes judgment only here. She admires a passing helicopter pilot who pulled a gun on Calley's men, preventing them from killing a bunker of civilians, and then helped the civilians to escape; she reserves her bitterest scorn not for the apparently slow-witted Calley but for the soldiers who, while refusing to take part in the killing, made no active effort to save any lives.) At what point does a "just war" become pointless murder? Calley was court-martialled and found guilty, but released after public protests. The war in Vietnam crumbled under just the kind of confusion felt by soldiers and the public over events of this kind. The fact that war is about killing leads us to question the reasons why particular wars take place. Bourke shows how the cheery, innocent euphoria felt by soldiers at the start of the first world war had become something very diff

Well-written, but overly familiar material.....

While the central theme is bold and original, the documentation and historical data fail to break any real ground. Still, to argue that human beings (yes, even Americans) enjoy killing and warfare far more than we would imagine is daring in an age when we prefer to discuss "sacrifice" and "nobility in death" more than deliberate and calculated killing. Interestingly enough, the book is far from a pacifist rant and the author refrains from demonizing soldiers and their superiors. Instead, the book concerns itself with the unavoidable truth about war: men, often from good backgrounds, possessing educations and the capacity for warmth and love, are able to brutally take the lives of others with little disruption to their conscience. Furthermore, these men are able to return to "civilization" and resume their duties as husbands, fathers, and workers. The author raises important questions related to our blindness about this disturbing fact. Perhaps, as she states, men remain quiet about their wartime experiences not because they are ashamed or disgusted, but because they enjoyed it in ways that cannot be conveyed to civilians and loved ones. The book will hopefully expand the debate about war and killing and instead of oversimplifying the factors that both cause and result from the ultimate form of human combat, we might attempt to face our collective (and human) passions and urges.

Shaken

At first I was surprised to find this title to be authored by a woman. In a genre dominated by male authors, Joanna Bourke reminds us all that the first and main objective of any war is to kill. As chilling as it is captivating, 'An Intimate History of Killing: Face-To-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare" weaves the stories of those who were there with the theories of scholars. It has opened up to me a new train of thought when researching any conflict and just what the men and women envolved endured and the affect on their lives.

An Intimate History of Killing

Historians and social scientists should read this book, even though it tends to be rambling and repetitious. History is influenced by the outcome of battles. The outcome of battle is influenced by the mental state of the combatants. This book sheds light on important questions: How could young men, the products of our enlightened civilization, behave as they did at My Lai? And the chaplain bless them? Should civilians fear veteran killers when they return home?Joanna Bourke has assembled a mass of English-language material (there are 144 pages of notes) about British, American, and Australian men in battle in the current century: WW-1, WW-2, Viet Nam. She also deals with training methods, the role of military chaplains, and responses of civilians to the war. She reports that often men feel they are acting out a script, as in a John Wayne movie, and killing is what they are supposed to do. Most soldiers enjoy killing; it's a high, like dope or sex. Afterward, soldiers must deal with guilt, denial, or acceptance. There are remakable similarities (eg. bayonet practice to develop a killer spirit) between the three wars she discusses, but the Viet Nam war was particularly screwed up -- at My Lai, they raped the women, then shot them -- as a result of poor civilian leadership.