History Commons^™

For soldier-authors in any western country, it is very important to explicitly assure their audiences that what they write is the truth (either subjective (35%) or objective (22%). They provide truth guarantees to substantiate this claim, the most important one being their own or someone else's memory (41%). This is despite the fact that they also explicitly perform self-censorship, for example by anonymising names (84% of the disclaimers) or black barring photos (34%). In every one of the countries researched (Netherlands, Germany, United Kingdom, United States and Canada) at least one author mentions having been censored by their own ministry …

It is often said that the majority of stories written by war veterans in the 20th century are disillusionment plots. But is that still the case in the 21st century? Are young men and women still going into, for example, Afghanistan with high ideals that are shattered during their deployment, and write books about their disillusionment? In this paper, the preliminary results are presented from a study into military books. Based on Friedman’s plot theory, this study compares all 54 autobiographical books published between 2001 and 2010 by Afghanistan veterans in three different languages from five different countries (the Netherlands, …