Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic

A soldier recounts his experiences during World War II and explains how, after being seriously wounded, he vowed he would never take orders again, a decision that colored his later years as a Harvard grad student and Rutgers University professor. Tour.

For most, World War II is nothing but a chapter in history--for most Americans, a rosy and happy one. But Paul Fussell, a novelist and WWII veteran, reminds us that only those who've experienced it can truly understand that war is hell. He writes with bite and humor of the horrors and inequalities of the so-called "Good War," which he says "for the United States, [was] an unintended form of eugenics, clearing the population of the dumbest, the least skilled, the least promising of all Americans." Not exactly the thoughts of a sentimentalist, but the notion that war is horrible should be eternally reinforced, and Fussell does so with a fury and skill few writers can muster.