Joanna Bourke: An Intimate History of Killing

(Granta)

$35.00

Review: John McCrystal*

How to ensure you're left alone in a backpackers' hostel: sit unshaven in a corner of the lounge, absorbed in a book named An Intimate History of Killing.

Keeping absorbed is no problem. The book is fascinating. It sets out to answer a question which we seldom ask: how it is that the man in the street of your average British, American or Australian city gets turned into the sort of person who not only can but will thrust a bayonet between the ribs of a fellow human being?

For answers, Joanna Bourke has trawled through official sources and the letters, diaries and memoirs of soldiers of these nationalities in the First and Second World Wars as well as the Vietnam War.

The most striking chapter is the first, "The Pleasures of Killing," where she quotes soldiers proclaiming the delights not only of playing with the machinery, letting off all the ordnance and enjoying the camaraderie of the trenches, but also the sheer fun that it can be to kill another person with a high-powered rifle or, most intimately of all, a bayonet.

Other chapters deal with the ways in which others were complicit in liberating soldiers from such killjoy social and moral constraints as civil laws against murder and religious tenets such as "Thou shalt not kill."

Politicians and doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, clerics and, of course, the civilian population all played their role.

Bourke's speciality has been social history and, in particular, the nature of gender. She examines the implications of the notion of women in combat roles.

If this book is to be believed, the rules of civilisation, including the roles imposed upon us by social expectation, are a thin veneer. It is an unsettling realisation.

Yet is it wholly to be believed? My reservation about Bourke's thesis is that, like all good stories, it is somewhat selective in the telling. It needfully deals in generalisations, and the image of soldiers and the makers and maintainers of military consciousness which emerges, while coherent, is not necessarily the whole truth, nor is it the only portrait which could be drawn. A different set of sources might well have produced a more reassuring view of humanity.

Somehow, we take war for granted, and assume that if it comes to that pass, then come of our citizens will fight it for us. But what is it about our fellow citizens that makes them not only able but, in many cases, willing to do it? And, more worryingly still, what makes them different from us? Are they different?

By the end of this book, you'll be returning your fellow backpackers' nervous glances.

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.