The Black Hills has been a national model for veterans who have chosen to write about their military experiences. First-person recollection promises an authenticity and immediacy that can be absent in more academic approaches.
Chances are, professors tend to know their topics only through secondhand research, perhaps even with anti-war biases that linger from campus culture.
But we shouldn’t always limit the writing of wartime memoirs as forever dark and deadly serious, any more than the rest of life. Humor was a way to relieve stress. There was fun with good friends. Some veterans will be more apt to explore their military record if lighter episodes can serve as an entryway into the past.
After all, most veterans didn’t serve in combat, were rear-echelon support, or were stationed stateside. The comic aspects of day-to-day military culture is well documented in cartoons and television. We need only remember the various episode of M*A*S*H, set in the Korean War but aired during the War in Vietnam. [forwarded by a Black Hills veteran]
