Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Presentation given at the Veteran Authors symposium organized by the Dutch Veterans' Institute as a general introduction to international military autobiographies, detailing the results from my study into military Afghanistan memoirs, showing who these contemporary authors are, what they write and why they write.

Het septembernummer van het veteranenblad Checkpoint is een special over veteranenboeken. Vanwege mijn wetenschappelijk onderzoek naar internationale militaire schrijvers, wilde de redactie graag weten of Nederlandse veteranenauteurs anders zijn dan militaire schrijvers uit andere landen. Mijn antwoord op die vraag is in dit artikel te vinden.

In this study, we look at all (n=15) military memoirs published between 2001 and 2010 in Britain about military participation in the Afghanistan conflict, to establish the factors which determine whether a military memoir becomes a best-seller (sales >10,000 copies), or not. We look at three aspects of the book: content (i.e. type of plot), cover (e.g. whether rank or the award of medals is mentioned) and author features (e.g. seniority, sex, co-authorship by another established writer, preface by well-known person), and analysed data on these aspects, and on sales figures, using SPSS. The results are interesting for the insight …

Military memoirs are written in many western countries, but who writes them, who publishes them, what is written in them and why they are written can differ from country to country. Some aspects, such as the low number of female writers, are universal, other aspects are warrior nation related, such as the kind of soldiers that get published by traditional publishers, and some aspects are completely country dependent, such as whether reservists publish books, or not. This presentation, given to the PSP (Power, Space and Politics) research group at Newcastle University, gives a quick overview of some of the results …

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 …