Document created: 04 May 2004
Air University Review, July-August 1971

The American Military Novel

Professor Wayne Miller’s examination of the fictional face of the American military establishment,* written originally as a doctoral dissertation, begins at the beginning with James Fenimore Cooper’s “military” novels, The Spy and The Pilot, and ends with Dr. Strangelove. Miller notes that Cooper’s two books establish one extreme of the attitudinal spectrum across which the military novel is spread. Both the Cooper works tend to glamorize the military and con­centrate on officers who accept without question the hierarchical and authoritarian assumptions that characterize the professional military.

At the other end of the spectrum Miller places Dr. Strangelove, the novelized version of the motion picture scenario by Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern, who in turn based their work on the novel Red Alert by Peter George. Dr. Strangelove, as those who saw the movie will recall, creates a cast of caricatures whose very names epitomize the tone and satiric intention of the book—General Buck Turgidson, Major King Kong, Colonel Jack D. Ripper, Colonel Bat Guano, and Dr. Strangelove himself.

Between those extremes in time and attitude, Professor Miller examines an impressive number of authors and novels dealing with the military.** Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, though set in the British rather than the U.S. navy, gets a great deal of attention, chiefly as the culminating work in what Miller sees as Melville’s progressively deepening concern with the conflict between individual freedom and institutional—especially military—constriction of conscience. Miller’s central assumption is that by its very nature the military stifles the best ethical, humanitarian, and intellectual impulses of those who, reluctantly or by choice, find themselves involved within it. He supports the assumption by frequent quotations from antimilitary social and political writers, such as Tristram Coffin, Fred J. Cook, and C. Wright Mills.

This argument is hard to contest if one chooses his evidence from American military novels. Especially is it true in the twentieth century that nearly every artistically worthwhile treatment of life within the military profession has been written by an author whose own experience of that life has been relatively short, relatively reluctant, and relatively unprofessional—which is to say, relatively antagonistic to the goals and assumptions of the military profession.

The image of military life in such novels as Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Jones’s From Here to Eternity, Heller’s Catch-22, and of course Dr. Strangelove has generally been one of oppression by usually inhuman, desensitized, cruel, corrupt power-figures whose inhumanity is not only condoned but often aided and abetted by an institutionalized monolith of mechanized incomprehension and appalling stupidity. Of course, there are differences among these novels in their images of the living people and concrete situations within their common military settings. Yet it is fair to note that in nearly every one of them the major antagonist of the conflict or the chief object of satire is a character or number of characters who embody what the author presents as the military ethic. And the protagonist is usually either a young, involuntarily recruited officer or enlisted man fighting to assert his individuality in the face of the overwhelmingly hostile and insensitive forces of the professional element of the military institution.

Professor Miller’s study examines in detail many novels which make these kinds of assumptions or which portray with realistic revulsion the profoundly horrible and disillusioning experiences of war. He correctly points out that this trend became firmly established in treatments of the Civil War experience in such works as Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage and has continued as a sustaining tradition in American military fiction to the present day. His chapters on the World War I novels and on the diversity of the novelistic recordings of World War II are excellent in their treatment of major writers and trends.

Miller devotes an entire chapter to a very judicious and balanced appraisal of J. P. Marquand’s Melville Goodwin, U.S.A. and James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor, with some attention also to W. W. Haines’s Command Decision. These works embody, as Miller points out, balanced analysis and general acceptance of the military structure. Especially in Guard of Honor the setting, the characters, and the conflicts present with honest realism the day-to-day world of the military as most of those who have lived in it have come to know it. And Miller perceptively notes that characters like Cozzens’s harassed yet rational and persistent Colonel Ross can fairly reflect both a full awareness of human values and a full sense of responsibility for one’s decisions within the military scheme of things.

Miller follows this generally favorable treatment of the balanced and realistic portrayals of military life with a chapter devoted entirely to a most sympathetic appraisal of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. This novel, Miller contends, is a brilliant satire not only on the military but also, through the military as microcosm, on the whole value structure of U.S. society. Miller quotes copiously and approvingly from the book, pointing out connotations, analogies, and symbolic implications of the characters and events in Heller’s mad military world. Miller’s insights are indubitably an aid to the general reader’s understanding of Heller’s novel. The chapter is one which any reader of Catch-22 will find illuminating. For those who have not read Heller’s book, it provides an excellent introduction; for those who have, it might well incite another.

Miller’s study ends with a chapter on “nuclear age” novels, among them Knebel and Bailey’s Seven Days in May and Burdick and Wheeler’s Fail-Safe, as well as Dr. Strangelove. None of these are works of real literary merit. As Miller observes, their chief appeal lies in the topicality of the issues they treat; “coupled with the non-fiction dealing with the same problems, they contribute to a composite of concern about national and human survival unprecedented in the history of American culture.”

It is altogether appropriate that Professor Miller’s book evaluate the American military novel in a social and political context. There is, of course, no distinctive generic criteria which identify a work as a “military” novel except the obvious requirement that it deal at least in part with a military setting and with characters who are involved in some way with the military services. However, some of the novels Miller examines, such as Melville’s Israel Potter and Faulkner’s Soldiers’ Pay, deal chiefly with the problems of the returned veteran rather than with military life as such. The pertinence of these works to Miller’s study is questionable.

On the other hand, there are a few notable omissions: a few important works by major authors do not appear either in the study or in the extensive bibliographical listing. Two of these, Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye and William Styron’s The Long March, certainly surpass in literary merit and in the scope of their implications many of the works that are included. A third novel, Anton Myrer’s Once an Eagle (1968), is certainly a work of sufficient magnitude to deserve a place in Professor Miller’s study (incidentally, it received the dubious distinction of being noticed and scorned by Ward Just in his articles on the U.S. Army in The Atlantic for October-November 1970 and more recently in his Military Men). Perhaps Myrer’s work was published after Miller had completed the research for his dissertation, but the 1970 copyright date of An Armed America indicates at least that a supplementary notation of some kind could have been included before the book’s publication. And to cavil at a detail, the book reveals several instances of careless proofreading; for instance, it is mildly annoying to the reader who knows Catch-22 to find Milo Minderbinder repeatedly identified as Milo Mindenbinder.

A more serious objection to the book has already been suggested: Professor Miller, despite his protestation in the introduction that he has “sought resolutely to avoid over-simplification . . . in order to easily condemn or easily praise,” quite obviously shares the concern of many of the writers he quotes—of both fiction and nonfiction—that the “military-industrial complex” is indeed in the saddle in our country and that its methods and motives are riding us in the direction of national disaster. He appears to believe that our problems would lessen immeasurably if the military would just go away entirely—or at least shrink to the tiniest possible dimensions. He leaves unanswered, as do many of the authors he cites, the question of how such a desired end can be accomplished, given the world as it is and men as they are. One can share his concern, even his wishes; but finally one is reduced to the hope that the Colonel Rosses of the world—both the military and the civilian world—can manage to prevail. One can hope that our institutions will learn from such men how better to be­come agencies of the people, by the people, for the people. Else we all may indeed perish from the earth.

Despite his emphasis on the sociological and political—as opposed to the artistic and literary—aspects of the authors and works he treats, Professor Miller has performed a service by raising serious questions about the function and influence of fictional literature in our society. He has charted a pathway that is essentially Platonic in its assumption that fiction is and should be primarily a utilitarian means of social and political comment. It is an assumption which many among the American reading public, including most military readers, are likely to share. His book will probably in the long view be important chiefly in evincing the concern of late twentieth century America with its sociopolitical problems, at the expense of any real concern that literature be judged chiefly by literary standards. But whatever topicality the book may now embody, it has much to commend it to both the military and civilian reader as a record (though sometimes incomplete) of the fictional face of the military establishment in America.

United States Air Force Academy

*Wayne C. Miller, An Armed America: Its Face in Fiction—a History of the American Military Novel (New York: New York University Press, 1970, $7.95), 294 pp.

**While an officer in the U.S. Air Force, Miller served in the Department of English at the Air Force Academy from 1963 until he left the service in 1967. he is now on the English faculty at the University of Cincinnati.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.