Coming to Terms with War: Traumas, Identities, and the Power of Words

Abstract

It is a fitting and revealing approach to categorize the phenomenon of war as a historical event, an existential experience, and a base for redemptive mythmaking (as envisioned by Paul Cohen in his History in Three Keys ). In their works, historians Tobie Meyer-Fong and Aaron William Moore focus on experience and mythmaking in the Taiping Civil War and the Pacific Theater in World War II, respectively. This review essay highlights these two authors' treatment of experience, with a brief look at mythmaking. Both books probe the sensory experience of war and of coming to terms with catastrophic events never before experienced. Meyer-Fong wants to make a place for individual suffering, loss, religiosity, and emotions (15). In a brilliantly written passage, Moore, whose analysis is based on wartime dia- ries of Japanese, Chinese, and American soldiers, notes that we cannot fully know what it means to be a soldier in the Second World War or totally grasp the experience of trauma throughout these passages. . . . Forces that wield