War's Haunting Beauty

In "i sing of Olaf" (1931) e.e. cummings casts a West Pointer, colonel trig, in the company of a group of "noncoms" who are torturing a soldier ("a conscientious object-or"), trying to "evoke / allegiance per blunt instruments" and other games: shoving his head in a toilet bowl; kicking and cursing him; applying heated bayonets that "egged the firstclass privates on / his rectum wickedly to tease." Tortured, Olaf remains steadfast. He "responds, without getting annoyed / 'I will not kiss your fucking flag'" and he "does almost ceaselessly repeat / 'there is some shit I will not eat.'"

At the end of "i sing of Olaf" the balladeer proclaims that Olaf himself is "more brave than me: more blond than you." The poet reaches out to challenge auditors who might, without his help, simply smile at the gamesmanship, thinking yet again that boys will be boys. The construction of the poem (its withholding of judgment about Olaf until we have witnessed firsthand the brutality—and its tersely rendered, searing images of business-as-usual torture) alerts us to a new kind of passive hero, a "yearning nation's blueeyed pride."

Alex Vernon has entitled his first collection of familiar essays most succinctly bred. Considering the context from which he plucks the title, I find it especially apt—ironically so. Within the poem cummings includes another passive observer—Olaf's "wellbelovéd colonel (trig / westpointer most succinctly bred)." When Olaf declares to his tormentors that he will not kiss the "fucking flag," we learn that "straightway the silver bird looked grave / (departing hurriedly to shave)"—an act less heinous, we might suppose from the poem's logic, than that of "our president, being of which / assertions duly notified / threw the yellowsonofabitch / into a dungeon, where he died." Different forms of passivity have their own assigned value in the fictive world of this poem. Action itself seems reprehensible, sullied.

We can surmise from most succinctly bred that Alex Vernon is not a West Pointer who would turn irresponsibly away from the torturing of men or women. But we know from his own suggestions that the central informing rhythm of his contemplative life is created by his turning, again and again, away from and then toward soldiering, away from and toward a military culture that can indeed seem, at times, its own variant of torture. Vernon served in the first Gulf War as a tank platoon leader, coauthored another book about his combat experiences (The Eyes of Orion), and has written extensively and well about the literature of war (Soldiers Once and Still: Ernest Hemingway, James Salter, and Tim O'Brien).

For his edited collection of essays about war (Arms and the Self: War, the Military, and Autobiographical Writing), Vernon chose Paul Fussell's words for the book's epigraph: "My war is virtually synonymous with my life. I entered the war when I was nineteen, and I have been in it ever since." Vernon's own language about war is spirited and manifestly reasonable; it carries on its surface none of the rancor that informs, animates, and sometimes deadens Fussell's accounts of war in books as varied as Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic. But Vernon did indeed take Doing Battle with him into combat. There was something about Fussell's expressed anger that must have comforted him, something about his own experience of combat that needed books to underpin it. He could have been only the angry passive observer. But he wasn't.

Most succinctly bred is not a war memoir in the conventional sense of that genre, nor is it a collection of essays that focuses on combat itself. Instead Vernon gives us a soldier's life (or what has so far been lived of it) without telling a single war story from inside his tank's turret. In a book of essays, arranged not according to the dates of composition but according to the chronology of the life they compose, Vernon devotes only two pages to the essay "then I went to war." He claims to...