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thedrifter
05-26-07, 08:13 AM
War Stories
On Memorial Day, keep in mind these books about soldiers in battle.

BY JOHN MCCAIN
Saturday, May 26, 2007 12:00 a.m. EDT

1. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner, 1940).

Before I entered the U.S. Naval Academy as a young man, I'd read "For Whom the Bell Tolls," a book that helped bring home to me one of the fundamentals of military experience: what it is that moves soldiers in battle. Clashing ideologies and interests might be the genesis of war, but for the soldier any conflict comes down to fighting for his brothers. In Ernest Hemingway's novel, the main character, Robert Jordan, is an American teacher who has joined the International Brigades; he is an idealist battling against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. But he becomes disenchanted--not necessarily with his cause but with its leaders and with their foreign allies. Still, in the end, Jordan voluntarily sacrifices his life for the sake of the people he fought alongside, the people he had come to love. Hemingway himself was not a veteran, but he saw war close up in the ambulance corps in World War I--a perspective that gave him a profound grasp of the instinct that binds warriors together.

2. "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" by Edward Gibbon (1776-8 .

Edward Gibbon's six-volume classic is rightly considered the greatest historical narrative ever written. It chronicles Roman rule from the second century to the empire's collapse in the west in the fourth century and in the east in the 15th, with the fall of Constantinople. Gibbon famously portrayed the "vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave." But his eloquent, sweeping exposition showed that this peerless imperial power had a hand in its own decay, done in by decadence, corruption and war. The soldiers of Rome's legions could not make up for the negligence of their leaders.

3. "This Kind of War" by T.R. Fehrenbach (Macmillan, 1963).

T.R. Fehrenbach's "This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness" is perhaps the best book ever written on the Korean War. Fehrenbach, who saw the conflict firsthand as an Army officer, offers a sobering, comprehensive look at a war that the U.S. military was ill prepared to fight. He relates in detail how American soldiers--many of whom were poorly trained and equipped--bore the burden of bad planning and the bad decisions of their senior commanders. The soldiers endured many setbacks and the most awful conditions, yet still overcame their enemy. The Korean War, sandwiched between World War II and the Vietnam War, is often overlooked, but it occasioned no smaller measure of heroism--or suffering--from the Americans who fought it.

4. "Hell in a Very Small Place" by Bernard B. Fall (Lippincott, 1966).

"Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu," another classic of its kind, is a fascinating look at the decisions in the French Indo-China war that led to the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, when a communist guerrilla force overwhelmed a French military base. The book also explores how the battle influenced America's involvement in Vietnam and how it helped the enemy learn a strategy and gain the confidence to fight us. Journalist Bernard Fall--who was killed in Vietnam in 1967, a year after the book's publication--merited all the acclaim he received for "Hell in a Very Small Place." It stands as a brilliant work of enduring historical importance. American leaders should ponder the lessons of Dien Bien Phu today just as they should have pondered them before following the French into Vietnam.

5. "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque (Little, Brown, 1929).

In Erich Maria Remarque's extraordinary novel, based on his experience fighting for Germany in World War I, a young man and his classmates march off to the trenches full of bravado--but in their first encounter with battle, they fall apart. All his vanity gone, the young man learns to hate the thing he thought would be an adventure. "All Quiet on the Western Front" is an indelible depiction of World War I, but it is also a timeless reminder that whether a conflict is necessary or not, whether it is ably commanded or mishandled, whether its outcome is just or unjust, war is a deadly enterprise. We should all shed a tear when war claims its wages.

Sen. McCain (R., Ariz.) is a former Navy aviator.

Ellie