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Notes -
I recently read, in a slightly weird context, two long-forgotten WWII memoirs published during the war (so generally as positive as is possible to be while remaining truthful - e.g. one of them devotes a paragraph to mentioning that there were some HQ officers he deeply disliked and thought did a terrible job, gives the unflattering nickname for one, then drops the topic as far as he can), and the sense I got from them was that when you're really at the frontline, you develop intense camaraderie or you die, but the moment you go behind the lines all the petty antagonisms come out. The real grunts stuck together in small groups even when behind the lines, but for the most part the military had a lot of every-man-for-himself balanced by small favours and horse-tradings. And of course every group dislikes and envies the guys behind them without much thought for the guys in front of them. Mailer, as suited to him, makes it much more alienated and emotional than these contemporary books (the other book, written from a frontliner's perspective, was mostly "you don't have room for emotions, except when talking about women, you either make ironclad friends with your squad or you go crazy/get killed, and humour is a critical survival mechanism"), but these accounts resonate together to me. Mailer was apparently mostly doing the miserable wait-around-build-stuff-steal-what-you-can work, whereas Junger was literally in the trenches for most of his war, and under artillery fire when not, so it makes sense the human relationships involved would be very different.
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