Secret War

Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, by Paul Fussell (Little, Brown, 320 pp., $24.95)

IN a long and distinguished career, Paul Fussell has achieved renown as teacher, literary critic, and author of pungent, self-consciously contrarious essays on contemporary American culture. But before all that he was—and in an important sense has remained—a soldier: a combat infantryman, a veteran of bitter fighting in Europe in World War II, permanently scarred by his intimate encounter with the brutality of combat and with the duplicity inherent in the way that nations organize themselves for modern war.

AJ

About the Author

Andrew J. Bacevich

Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, by Paul Fussell (Little, Brown, 320 pp., $24.95)

IN a long and distinguished career, Paul Fussell has achieved renown as teacher, literary critic, and author of pungent, self-consciously contrarious essays on contemporary American culture. But before all that he was—and in an important sense has remained—a soldier: a combat infantryman, a veteran of bitter fighting in Europe in World War II, permanently scarred by his intimate encounter with the brutality of combat and with the duplicity inherent in the way that nations organize themselves for modern war.