Bodily Pain, Combat, and the Politics of Memoirs: Between the American Civil War and the War in Vietnam

This article analyses the languages of wartime pain as seen in British and American memoirs from the American Civil War to the present.How did the rhetoric of wounding in these war memoirs change over time?One of the central shifts lies in the way that wounded men presented themselves as stoic in spite of severe wounding.From 1939, and in an even more dramatic fashion by the war in Vietnam, physical suffering remained a test of manliness, but the tone was defiant and aggressive rather than stoic or resigned.The article also looks at the role of individual publishers and the introduction of psychological dimensions of wounding in latter memoirs.Bodily pain in wartime is unique.It is purposefully inflicted, resolutely public, and relentlessly acute.As a colonel in the Medical Corps, United States Army, put it in The Doctor's Part (1918), "If you want to know what … a wound looks like, go buy a beefsteak big enough for a family of four and lay it on the back of your thigh and then try and realize that it was a tender, quivering area." 1 But how did personnel serving in the various branches of the American and British military feel about their wounds?Through an analysis of war memoirs based on conflicts from the American Civil War to the present, I explore the divergent ways in which wounded men (and occasionally women), as well as those who ministered to them, imposed meaning onto military practices involving pain.I ask: what languages did British and American citizens use to communicate the sensations of bodily pain resulting from combat in wars from the American Civil War to the war in Vietnam?How did the rhetoric of wounding in war memoirs change over time?The research for this article is based on an analysis of just over 500 memoirs held in the Wellcome Trust Library, the London Metropolitan Archive, the Imperial War Museum, and the British Library.Memoirs are a rich source for analyses that seek to map changes in subjective sensations arising from military activities.Written after the war, they reflect individuals' recollection of what they believe were very significant events in their lives.As we shall see, memoirs reflect not only the social and cultural milieu in which they were composed, but also the preconceptions of publishers about the "market" for such books.Memoirs occupy a very distinctive genre, even if they also draw upon traditions within fiction, reportage, and autobiography more generally.They are a public form of recollecting the past.As Soviet historian Barbara Walker put it, the value of memoirs lies less in their factual content and more in "how they reflect the ways that their authors … view the world: how they think about the past, and how they connect it to their present; how they believe that society should work, and what they see as appropriate or ideal social, economic, and political behavior." 2 For my purposes, they are particularly useful in unpicking the emotional history of war.Given that wounding is the central feature of combat, it is remarkable that so little has been written about it.Scholarly research on psychological anguish arising from war has grown enormously in the past decade, 3 and there is a burgeoning literature on the treatment and rehabilitation of service personnel during and after war, 4 but bodily suffering has been, at Europe

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