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Americans at War

Review: Alexander Rose, 'Men of War: The American Soldier in Combat at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, and Iwo Jima'

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Marine Corps War Memorial / AP
July 12, 2015

On the final day of fighting at Gettysburg, the blood had mixed with the dirt, darkening the mud in the Pennsylvania fields. Bayonets were fixed, swords drawn, and the casualties were heavy. Formal Napoleonic tactics maneuvers culminated in brutal episodes of hand-to-hand combat. One Confederate soldier fought through the chaos by bludgeoning five men with the stock of his rifle and shooting another. The Federal flag that was his objective was, finally, just an arms-length away from him. As he reached for it, a fellow soldier cut in and picked it up. As was often the case during the Civil War, the lucky soldier who managed to secure the enemy’s colors was rewarded with leave by the commanding general. His comrade claimed victory, and also won a ticket home. The other soldier’s fate is not certain.

Alexander Roseincludes this story in his new book, Men of War, which profiles ordinary American soldiers under fire at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, and Iwo Jima. Rose, the best selling author of Washington’s Spies, seeks here to answer the question, "What is combat like?"History lovers and veterans of modern wars have here a book that does not glamorize conflict. Those new to military writing may be shocked. What separates Men Of War from other works on these three battles is Rose's ability to mix extensive strategic and cultural knowledge of these wars with descriptive, often excruciating first-person accounts.

Rose’s expertise as a researcher and historian serves him well on this topic. Rose’s most descriptive stories bring these distant conflicts into a vivid and painful reality on the page. He works heavily with first-person accounts, including soldiers’testimonies, some dating back 240 years, for context. The testimonies range from a colonist witnessing his comrade being decapitated by a cannonball, to a medic pushing a marine’s eyeball back into his socket before sending him back into the fight. The detail is vivid, but the gore is not overdone, considering the book’s aim. The presence of gruesome detail serves a point other than shock value. Rose describes the events as they happened, and to compile remarkably comprehensive accounts of the battles he focuses on.

After the fighting is done, Rose’s book details the psychologically taxing journey soldiers took in order to come home. To illustrate the most truthful experience he chose the three toughest battles in American history, portraying the rockiest possible roads for a soldier to travel. While Rose does not extensively discuss the factors that brought men to war, he does linger on the post traumatic stress disorder that soldiers are sometimes left with.

The book ultimately provides the reader with an answer to the question, "What is combat like?"Rose’s response is simple. War is hell.

Published under: Book reviews