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Rating: 
Summary: Insightful and thought-provoking (despite unfair criticisms)
Review: As an active duty chaplain in the military I had a significant interest in chapter 9, Priests and Padres. First, I was amazed at the number of references and her ability to read, organize, and synthesize them into a narrative. These references, however, are derived from a significant number of ministers writings or sermons, which became the framework for her conclusions. Furthermore, multiple references, representing several wars, are devoid of their cultural-historical context and woven into one sentence or paragraph leaving the reader to think the behavior, concept, or issue is timeless and characteristic of clergy. I don't consider the chapter a valid historical analysis because of the limitations of the source material. What the chapter does provide is a summary of her sources convictions and behaviors-which is not the whole story. Since I considered her conclusions in chapter 9 highly subjective I did not read the rest of the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Priests and Padres: A Very Narrow View of Reality
Review: As an active duty chaplain in the military I had a significant interest in chapter 9, Priests and Padres. First, I was amazed at the number of references and her ability to read, organize, and synthesize them into a narrative. These references, however, are derived from a significant number of ministers writings or sermons, which became the framework for her conclusions. Furthermore, multiple references, representing several wars, are devoid of their cultural-historical context and woven into one sentence or paragraph leaving the reader to think the behavior, concept, or issue is timeless and characteristic of clergy. I don't consider the chapter a valid historical analysis because of the limitations of the source material. What the chapter does provide is a summary of her sources convictions and behaviors-which is not the whole story. Since I considered her conclusions in chapter 9 highly subjective I did not read the rest of the book.
Rating:
Summary: Insightful and thought-provoking (despite unfair criticisms)
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: A fascinating book (contains grisly details)
Review: 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 different by the 70s. The real point of the war in Vietnam is that it was not a US defeat but a Vietnamese victory; the convulsions of American guilt and defensiveness seem frivolous compared to the amazing achievement of a tiny, rural country in beating the world's biggest superpower. It makes you wonder exactly what sort of "liberal democracy" was being fought for.
Rating:
Summary: Despite Footnotes, Bourke does not know Sources
Review: The depressing thing about this book is that it *could* have been good. Interesting, in a morbid sort of way, Bourke attempts to demonstrate that war is about killing. Despite the "well DUH" factor that entails, there is potential in this approach. Unfortunately, Bourke is not a military historian, and as a result has no clue about the sources she uses. The most egregious examples of course, have to do with the numerous fakes (fake combat veterans that is) she cites. Since she did practically zero primary source research for this book (at least that is the impression one gets from her footnotes) all she has really done here is assembled other people's writings. She did not know the field well enough to know that many of her sources for American behavior in Vietnam were not who they said they were in various other books written by non-historians. Most glaringly are the citations of Woodley and Kirkland, both African Americans that claimed to have committed atrocities, both in Special Forces or Long Range Recon(if you believe their accounts in Wallace Terry's book _Bloods_), but the reality was that one was a supply clerk and the other was a truck driver. Similar problems exist with fully 1/5 of the accounts Bourke uses on Americans in Vietnam, a depressing demonstration of the lack of rigor in today's modern academic history. Adding insult to injury, despite the fact that she acknowledges that one of her central conceptual sources (I stopped counting at 50 citations of this one source), SLA Marshall, "had problems" she continues to use his material throughout. Marshall's problem was that he made his statistics UP! How can one cite a man who's been proven a liar, and a fraud? I don't get it. Finally, there are the problems when Bourke cites novels as though they are historical sources. I recognized at least two novels in her bibliography, so I went back and checked the notes...yep, she cites Anton Myrer's _Once An Eagle_ (a great novel, but a novel none the less)as though it were a memoir. There may be more than two cited, I am only familiar with the American novels. For all I know half her English "sources" might be novels too. As I said, this is depressing because the subject matter *is* important, and potentially useful. Oh well.
Rating:
Summary: Despite Footnotes, Bourke does not know Sources
Review: The depressing thing about this book is that it *could* have been good. Interesting, in a morbid sort of way, Bourke attempts to demonstrate that war is about killing. Despite the "well DUH" factor that entails, there is potential in this approach. Unfortunately, Bourke is not a military historian, and as a result has no clue about the sources she uses. The most egregious examples of course, have to do with the numerous fakes (fake combat veterans that is) she cites. Since she did practically zero primary source research for this book (at least that is the impression one gets from her footnotes) all she has really done here is assembled other people's writings. She did not know the field well enough to know that many of her sources for American behavior in Vietnam were not who they said they were in various other books written by non-historians. Most glaringly are the citations of Woodley and Kirkland, both African Americans that claimed to have committed atrocities, both in Special Forces or Long Range Recon(if you believe their accounts in Wallace Terry's book _Bloods_), but the reality was that one was a supply clerk and the other was a truck driver. Similar problems exist with fully 1/5 of the accounts Bourke uses on Americans in Vietnam, a depressing demonstration of the lack of rigor in today's modern academic history. Adding insult to injury, despite the fact that she acknowledges that one of her central conceptual sources (I stopped counting at 50 citations of this one source), SLA Marshall, "had problems" she continues to use his material throughout. Marshall's problem was that he made his statistics UP! How can one cite a man who's been proven a liar, and a fraud? I don't get it. Finally, there are the problems when Bourke cites novels as though they are historical sources. I recognized at least two novels in her bibliography, so I went back and checked the notes...yep, she cites Anton Myrer's _Once An Eagle_ (a great novel, but a novel none the less)as though it were a memoir. There may be more than two cited, I am only familiar with the American novels. For all I know half her English "sources" might be novels too. As I said, this is depressing because the subject matter *is* important, and potentially useful. Oh well.
Rating: 
Summary: Intellectuals have a problem with killing
Review: This book is one of a number I've read lately where professors and writers comfortably ensconsed in the cushy halls of Academe take it upon themselves to try and explain that most human of endeavors: killing. They can't do it- inevitably their works become exercises in hypocritical whining. Aesthetic revulsion is their first reaction- after all it isn't pretty. Then comes moral outrage- how am I(the ensconsed intellectual) expected to live in a world where things like this happen? Anyone who reads alot of history and looks at picture books already knows exactly where this book is going to go; thousands upon thousands of pages have been written about the horror of war and Duh! War = Killing. Depending on the fashion of the day it is either very difficult for humans to kill or it is the most natural thing in the world. Books like this tend to be voyeuristic- each new outrage generates more pious excitement. Sadly, in real life there are times when killing needs done(WW2 for example)and all the post-event judgement in the world won't change that.
Rating:
Summary: Analytical Anorexia
Review: This book smacks of having had its conception in the recognition of a niche in the academic market, rather than being driven by a thesis deeper than the (apparently) surprising revelation that war calls for the determined and systematic killing of the enemy. Errors of citation and overworked references I might have forgiven - the general lack of analysis in any kind of depth, I could not. Save your money. Better yet, spend it on Grossman's "On Killing", or Holmes' "Acts of War" (arguably the outstanding work of this kind), and even Marshall's "Men Against Fire". Clive Gower-Collins
Rating:
Summary: Not worth the time...
Review: This rather massive book is long on notes, which gives the impression of careful study, but in fact is not much for substance. There is nothing new here. Men -- and women -- are involved in fighting and killing; some are heroic in every sense and others commit atrocities. They all participate in warfare for what they believe are valid and worthwhile reasons. Their perceptions are molded in part by the books they read, the stories they hear, and in the latter part of the century, what they see in movies or on television. One reviewer on the book jacket claimed that this was "good revisionist history." How? Is it that we now realize that there is really not much glory in warfare, no matter how necessary conflict may sometimes be? That frightened people under incredible stress sometimes react badly? No, nothing new here nor terribly revisionist either. Ms. Bourke dwells a lot on barbarous acts, the mutilation of bodies being just one example. Much is made of "necklaces of ears" or of other body parts taken and flaunted in accounts of the Vietnam war. Having served there, I can assure the author that we all smelled bad enough without carrying around or wearing body parts of enemy dead. That it was done is somehow seen as common rather than the very rare aberration it actually was. Just one of the many myths of that war fostered by writers who, even if veterans, have their own agenda: the war was not bad enough just by itself, they have to make it even more horrible. The book also suffers from poor editing. Names are wrong, and the index not always accurate. Lastly, the author is drawing her conclusions (that fit her preconceived notions?) from excerpts from various books on the two world wars and Vietnam. Each of those books is a personal view and sometimes reflects ONLY that participant's perception. Ms. Bourke seems to find universal truths in that approach, but I feel it is rather a leap. Which brings me to the only really good thing about this book: it has a marvelous bibliography. My advice to readers is to seek some of those books out. As for killing and how it's done, taught, and thought of, Dave Grossman does it much better with his masterful ON KILLING.
Rating:
Summary: Well-written, but overly familiar material.....
Review: 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.
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