What Do Military Memoirs Do?

Abstract

In this chapter, we ask what it is that military memoirs do. We do this by thinking about the functions of the military memoir, looking at the range of ways in which these books are used in order to consider the purposes they can be seen to serve. We review how military memoirs have informed the writing of histories of armed conflicts, and their utility in exploring the socio-cultural understandings of war and the sociology of military personnel. We think about the public readership of military memoirs, and the difficulties of establishing clear ideas about that readership. We conclude this chapter by considering how these books might (or might not) be seen as vectors for militarisation, exploring how military memoirs exist as commercial products with a market and associated sales profiles, and sit within a set of cultural products and practices which make sense of war and military activities in particular ways. All through this chapter, we are concerned with the work that military memoirs do in arguments about armed conflict, the military activities that make it possible and the military personnel employed and deployed to those tasks.