War Lies

I CAN STILL remember the excitement of discovering the drugstore rack of mass-market paperbacks in the vast, idiosyncratic bookstore where I spent so many youthful Saturdays. It was stationed incongruously close to aisles full of the “serious” books on my school’s summer reading list. The gaudy covers on the rack shrieked at me with images of fiery explosions and titles in bold capital letters, often punctuated by exclamation marks (just in case the point was lost). You see, these were books about WAR: I. J. Galantin’s Take Her Deep!, a World War II submarine captain’s account of submerging to rivet-popping depths in the Luzon Strait; George S. Patton Jr.’s War As I Knew It, subtitled (also in capitals), The Battle Memoirs of ‘Blood ’N Guts’; and, most memorable of all, Audie Murphy’s bestselling autobiography, To Hell and Back.